Book Review: A Poetry Handbook

This morning I had the awful experience of having two of my wisdom teeth extracted. Aside from sleep and cold, soft food, I have consumed much of the written word: hour-by-hour updates on my mobile AP news app for the iPhone (a growing addiction), a story by Kumin, poems by Ostriker and Bracho, and the final few chapters of Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry. I am well satisfied.

In Provincetown this past June, I acquired Mary's Oliver's At Blackwood Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver for the sole purpose of hearing her read "Wild Geese." I hear her poems often now in the car, whether I'm playing the CD or simply relishing in remembering them. When my partner brought home her Poetry Handbook, I expected good things.

The handbook is easy to read, clear, and thoughtful. There are subjects about which Oliver is more superficial than I'd prefer (image, prose poem), but there are many that she illuminates with complexity (line, sound, workshop vs. solitude). The text offers several example poems and words of encouragement. Here is a sampling of lines I underlined:

• "The free-verse poem sets up, in terms of sound and line, a premise or an expectation, and then, before the poem finishes, it makes good response to the premise" (68).
• "[A free-verse poem] need not follow any of the old rules necessarily. Neither does it have to avoid all of them necessarily" (68-69).
• "The poem is not a discussion, not a lecture, but an instance--an instance of attention, of noticing something in the world" (74).

Useful, practical, inspriring stuff. A good quick read that would be a lovely text for an introductory poetry or creative writing class at the high school or college level. As someone who is simultaneously reading sevearal writing guides, it was not hard to choose Oliver as the guide of choice on a tired day.