This slender guide by Mary Oliver deserves a place on the shelves of any budding poet. In clear, accessible prose, Oliver (winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for poetry) arms the reader with an understanding of the technical aspects of poetry writing. Her lessons on sound, line (length, meter, breaks), poetic forms (and lack thereof), tone, imagery, and revision are illustrated by a handful of wonderful poems (too bad Oliver was so modest as to not include her own). What could have been a dry account is infused throughout with Oliver's passion for her subject, which she describes as "a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind." One comes away from this volume feeling both empowered and daunted. Writing poetry is good, hard work.


From Publishers Weekly
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.


From Library Journal
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.


From Booklist
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

FROM OUR EDITORS

Mary Oliver is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner and one of the most celebrated poets of our time. In A Poetry Handbook, Oliver imparts some of her wisdom and impressions about poetry -- everything from the basics of building a poem to how form and diction work. The chapter on revision alone makes this one worth it, but Oliver's look at the works of such luminaries as Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop adds immeasurable value.

ANNOTATION

With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built--meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. Drawing on poems from Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner imparts an extraordinary amount of information in a short space.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

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.'' (July)

Library Journal