A Poetry Handbook

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 w...

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.

玛丽•奥利弗(Mary Oliver,1935-2019)，美国当代最广为人知且备受尊敬的诗人之一，以书写自然著称。

1984年获得普利策奖，1992年获得国家图书奖，长年隐居山林，创作多以山野自然为对象，被称为美国当代的“归隐诗人”。《纽约时报》评论她为“美国有史以来最畅销的诗人”。

代表诗集有：《夜晚的旅行者》（The Night Traveler，1978），《白松：诗和散文诗》（White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems，1994），《为何我早早醒来》（Why I wake early，2005）等。