A Poetry Handbook—Mary Oliver

Last year, my wife gave me a volume of poems by Mary Oliver, who quickly became a favorite poet. While looking through her books on Amazon, I discovered she wrote a couple books about reading and writing poetry. I picked up A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry.

This book is fantastic, and I’m reading it a second time. One thing I love about Oliver’s poetry is the simplicity of her language. This is true of A Poetry Handbook as well. Though Oliver taught poetry at the university level, hers is no ivory tower voice. Instead, it’s personal and accessible—as if a good friend were talking with you about poetry.

Though A Poetry Handbook is “Poetry 101,” Oliver’s presentation and insight into poetry’s basic elements makes it worth reading regardless of your familiarity with poetry. After my first reading of A Poetry Handbook, I quickly bought another of Oliver’s instructional books entitled, Rules For The Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse. I can’t wait to read it!

Whether you write, read, or are just curious about poetry, I highly recommend this book. Being that this post is about Mary Oliver, I thought it fitting to end with a poem of hers that I love called “Spring.”

SPRING
(Mary Oliver, Poetry Magazine April 1990)

And here is the serpent again, 
dragging himself out from his nest of darkness, 
his cave under the black rocks,
his winter-death.
He slides over the pine needles. 
He loops around the bunches of rising grass,
looking for the sun.

Well, who doesn't want the sun after the long winter?
I step aside,
he feels the air with his soft tongue, 
around the bones of his body he moves like oil,

downhill he goes
toward the black mirrors of the pond.
Last night it was still so cold 
I woke and went out to stand in the yard,
and there was no moon.

So I just stood there, inside the jaw of nothing. 
An owl cried in the distance, 
I thought of Jesus, how he 
crouched in the dark for two nights,
then floated back above the horizon.

There are so many stories,
more beautiful than answers.
I follow the snake down to the pond, 

thick and musky he is
as circular as hope.