I'm not familiar with the series this book is from so maybe all of the books have a tendency to read like this-- but to me this isn't really much of an instructional guide at all. 

There are certainly good lessons to take away, but they're wrapped up in such dense directions of poetry (and this books seems really only interested in poetry and poetry alone) that this already short book feels like it has no meat on the bone that isn't one poet gushing over another. 

Doty is clearly extremely intelligent and a gorgeous writer with a great metal detector for picking out what is beautiful or unspeakable (and then speaks it) but I think a great deal of the lessons don't really even get close enough to "description" in writing. It's just analysis of the poems an overwhelming majority of the time. "The art of the poetic" is already a book in this series. If you swapped the titles you would never be able to tell that this book was supposed to be about descriptions. To not have a single bit of prose analysis in here just seems like a bait and switch. 

Short and good to read if you go in hoping to learn something, anything about poetry. I'm definitely interested in checking out other books in this series-- but if they're anything like this I'd be very disappointed.