Are poetry books (US) too long?
Is it just me or are US poetry books getting longer, poems increasingly spaced out? I'm looking at a recent book from FSG: 103 pages long...but each page only contains 16-20 lines of poetry depending on how many stanza breaks there are. Beautifully set, of course, all that white space is like velvet under gems in a jewelry shop--or so I imagine, not having spent much time in jewelry shops.
So I looked at a couple of recent Faber poetry books. They tend to have fewer pages (51 for Maurice Riordan's new book; 85 for Heaney's Human Chain) but more lines per page. They still look good though. Maybe it all works out to the same thing? Maybe if the books are fatter the price can be higher? ($24 for FSG, 13 pounds sterling for FF).