Chapter 1. Contemporary poetry and textual meaning.- Part 1: Core Features Of Textual Meaning.- Chapter 2. Naming and Describing: people, places and things in poems.- Chapter 3. Representing processes: actions, states and events in poetry .- Chapter 4.
Prioritising: Subordination and information structure in poems.- Chapter 5. Representing time, space and society: constructing the world of the poem.- Part 2: Intermittent Features Of Textual Meaning.- Chapter 6. Equating and Contrasting: Constructing equivalence and opposition in poems.- Chapter 7. Enumerating and Exemplifying: Lists and open meaning in poems.
- Chapter 8. Negating: Poetic construction of what is not.- Chapter 9. Hypothesising: Possible Worlds, hypothetical scenarios and wish fulfilment in poems.- Chapter 10. Alluding: Implying and Assuming in poems.- Chapter 11. Presenting others' speech and thought: Multiple voices in poems.
- Chapter 12. Evoking: experiencing the poem's world.- Part Three: Conclusions.- Chapter 13. Putting it all together: Integrated analysis of poems.- Chapter 14. Textual meaning, linguistic theory and the stylistics of poetry.