A Poetry Handbook - Softcover

Oliver, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156724006 ISBN 13: 9780156724005

Publisher: Ecco, 1994

Synopsis

“Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that’s what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook.”—Los Angeles Times

From the beloved and acclaimed poet, an ultimate guide to writing and understanding poetry.

With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks readers through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver’s prolific mind—a must-have for all poetry-lovers.

About this title

About the Author

Mary Oliver (1935–2019), one of the most popular and widely honored poets in the U.S., was the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, she received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for American Primitive in 1984. Oliver also received the Shelley Memorial Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award; the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light; the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems; a Lannan Foundation Literary Award; and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence. She lived most of her life in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Reviews

National Book Award winner Oliver ( New and Selected Poems ) delivers with uncommon concision and good sense that paradoxical thing: a prose guide to writing poetry. Her discussion may be of equal interest to poetry readers and beginning or experienced writers. She's neither a romantic nor a mechanic, but someone who has observed poems and their writing closely and who writes with unassuming authority about the work she and others do, interspersing history and analysis with exemplary poems (the poets include James Wright, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and Walt Whitman). Divided into short chapters on sound, the line, imagery, tone, received forms and free verse, the book also considers the need for revision (an Oliver poem typically passes through 40 or 50 drafts before it is done) and the pros and cons of writing workshops. And though her prose is wisely spare, a reader also falls gladly on signs of a poet: "Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live?" or "Poems begin in experience, but poems are not in fact experience . . . they exist in order to be poems."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Late in his career, William Butler Yeats urged fellow poets to learn their craft. Heeding his advice, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Oliver (New and Selected Poems, LJ 10/92) provides an excellent handbook for young poets on the formal aspects and structure of poetry. Oliver excels at explaining the sound and sense of poetry-from scansion to imagery, diction to voice. She stresses the importance of reading poetry, since, in order to write well, "it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply." Sage advice is given in an entire chapter dedicated to revision, wherein Oliver urges poets to consider their first draft "an unfinished piece of work" that can be polished and improved later. Written in a pleasant and lucid style, this book is a wonderful resource for teachers of poetry. Highly recommended for all school libraries.
Tim Gavin, Episcopal Acad., Merion, Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Why another such handbook, when Babette Deutsch's and John Hollander's are more than sufficient? Because Mary Oliver does more with this book than simply review the difference between a haiku and a tanka, between free verse and blank. She starts in at poetry's real beginning, discussing the need for patient application: the need, in brief, to write and to do so regularly. She immediately proceeds by insisting on the necessity of reading poetry and of imitating favorite poets, and she even includes a chapter on the usefulness of workshops. Her chapters on those basics, sound and meter, are brief but exact, and she offers an entire chapter on free verse, another on poetic diction. But it is not really the book's contents that make it such a treasure: it is rather the pithiness and perfection of Oliver's expression. She so deeply knows her craft that she can describe it with perfect simplicity and concision. Pat Monaghan

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0156724006
• ISBN 13: 9780156724005
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 130