A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

Over the years I have acquired a few books of poetry, mainly by my favourite writers. However, in the main I have struggled with the modern poets: Larkin, Pinter even Muriel Spark. Although the last of these is better known as a novelist she says "I have always thought of myself as a poet".

So I decided to find a book that would explain the intricacies of this art form, never having been taught it before. Mary Oliver's book is described on the front cover as "A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry". Although in her introduction she says "it was written with writers of poetry most vividly in my mind". I have no ambition to actually write poetry but I wanted to understand the craft.

And I could not have wished for a better introduction to the mechanics of a poem. Here we have meter and rhyme and how the poets of past wrote in a strict metrical pattern. She describes iambic pentameter as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day". A chapter on Sound takes us to Alliteration (repeating consonants as in "live and learn")  and Assonance (repeating vowel sounds), Diphthong (a sound formed by a combination of two vowels in a single syllable in which the sound begins as one vowel and moves towards another as in "coin" or "loud" and Onomatopoeia ("bees buzz" or "the big bellied gun that belched").

She then describes The Line. In metrical verse she talks about iambic pentameter (as noted above) and tetrameter ("I wandered lonely as a cloud"), trochee where heavy stress comes first ("Double, double, toil and trouble") and caesura where a pause is used ("Forlon!  The very word is like a bell").
Whoever would have thought we have masculine rhyme (tears, fears) and feminine rhyme (buckle, knuckle).

A section on the mysteries (to me) of free verse insists that despite being free from the restaints of meter, the measured line and strict rhyming patterns, it still needs to have rhythm, pause and the musicality of the words.

However, my big problem now is my memory. I'm not sure how much of the above will stick when I next read a poem. Or whether my subconscious will enable me to realise what I am reading. We shall see.