George MacBeth is a poet of trickery and wild contradictions who has made a career out of defying expectations for what constitutes "good" poetry. Born in 1932 to George MacBeth and Amelia Morton Mary Mann MacBeth in the small town of Shotts, Scotland, MacBeth was raised in Sheffield. His poetry, however, is marked with a big city, often world-weary consciousness. In 1955 he graduated from New College, Oxford with a degree in Classical Greats, and later produced shows on literature and the arts for the BBC. His poetry, however, often undermines the constraints, both thematic and stylistic, of Classical literature. Although his first collection of poems, A Form of Words (1954), was relatively in keeping with the conventions of mid-century British poetry, most of the poetry he published after is a macabre verse laden with black humor, which embraces various kinds of satire, parody, and often unidentifiable tones. MacBeth...