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Blue Horses: Poems (2014)

by Mary Oliver(Favorite Author)

4.31 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1594204799 (ISBN13: 9781594204791)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Penguin Press HC, The

review 1: Most long time fans of Oliver (but most will call her Mary, since she does seem to she speaking directly to you, and you get a sense from her, more than most poets, that you know her) will not be dissuaded. This is yet another love letter to you, to the earth. And many of her familiar themes are here, which can be basically summed up: Pay attention, and especially so to nature, because if you do, she speaks to you. For example, stones she picks up and puts with water in a jar, as so many of us have done or still do. They speak to her. A poem about a painting of Blue Horses is acclaimed for doing what she has begged us for decades to do. He pays attention in his art, and that is a lovely poem. But these poems are not among her best work, as attractively packaged as they are... more, with the painting of the blue horses on the cover. The poems are generally short, and in this way inviting, but they are more discursive and reflective than lyrical. She talks to us. She wrestles with "the poetic" in these poems, both explicitly (she talks of this subject) and implicitly (in that she consciously works to make her language plain and every day, with a direct address to her readers) and what distances some people from poetry through language. And that is good, she reaches out to us, she is against affectations of the academic poets, and yet her language is often elegant and powerful in places.. just less so than in some of her earlier poems. But I have loved her work and will likely read it/her until she writes no more, and then will read her again.
review 2: Mary Oliver has a way of helping me peer deeper inside this world and inside myself and appreciating the paradoxes of life and death, shadows and light, Summer and Winter, fear and courage, among many others. Oliver ponders a hummingbird or a boat and stirs the imagination and raises existential questions about who we are and why we do what we do. I look forward to more poetry from one of my favorite poets! less

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