Rules for the Dance - by Mary Oliver (Paperback)

About the Book

With a poet's ear and a poet's grace of expression, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner Mary Oliver shows what makes a metrical poem work--and enables readers, as only she can, to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure that intensify both the poem's narrative and its ideas".

Book Synopsis

Pulitzer-prize winning poet and National Book Award winner, Mary Oliver, provides a graceful manual on the mechanics of poetical composition.

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance," wrote Alexander Pope. "The dance," in the case of this brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet's ear and a poet's grace of expression, Mary Oliver helps us understand what makes a metrical poem work--and enables readers, as only she can, to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure."

With an anthology of fifty poems representing the best metrical poetry in English, from the Elizabethan Age to Elizabeth Bishop.

Review Quotes

"What good company Mary Oliver is!" The Los Angeles Times