Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 BIALOSKY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 921 BIALOSKY | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"Bialosky's erudite and instructive approach to poetry [is] itself a refreshing tonic." -- Chicago Tribune
"Wisdom and deep compassion...make [Bialosky's book] a tremendous asset both to readers and other writers." -- The Washington Post
An unconventional and inventive coming-of-age memoir organized around fifty-one remarkable poems by poets such as Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath, from a critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author and poet.
For Jill Bialosky, certain poems stand out like signposts at pivotal moments in a life: the death of a father, adolescence, first love, leaving home, the suicide of a sister, marriage, the birth of a child, the day in New York City the Twin Towers fell. As Bialosky narrates these moments, she illuminates the ways in which particular poems offered insight, compassion, and connection, and shows how poetry can be a blueprint for living. In Poetry Will Save Your Life, Bialosky recalls when she encountered each formative poem, and how its importance and meaning evolved over time, allowing new insights and perceptions to emerge.
While Bialosky's personal stories animate each poem, they touch on many universal experiences, from the awkwardness of girlhood, to crises of faith and identity, from braving a new life in a foreign city to enduring the loss of a loved one, from becoming a parent to growing creatively as a poet and artist.
In Poetry Will Save Your Life, Bialosky has crafted an engaging and entirely original examination of a life while celebrating the enduring value of poetry, not as a purely cerebral activity, but as a means of conveying personal experience and as a source of comfort and intimacy. In doing so she brilliantly illustrates the ways in which poetry can be an integral part of life itself and can, in fact, save your life.
Author Notes
Jill Bialosky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She studied at Ohio University and received and M.A. in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, as well as an M.F.A. from the uNiversity of Iowa. She is an editor at W.W. Norton and lives in New York City with her husband and son.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bialosky (History of a Suicide) weaves 51 poems by several writers into her latest memoir, which beautifully conveys the "mystery and wonder" of poetry. Born in 1950s Cleveland, Bialosky was a toddler when her father died; though she was close with her mother and sisters, she yearned for the "tenderness and love" that she imagined a father would have provided. As she grew older, Bialosky found the tenderness she was longing for in poetry. A bookish, reserved teen, she attended college in Vermont and Ohio and then became an editor in New York (she's currently an executive editor at Norton), holding fast to her desire to write and live an independent, creative life. As the years pass in her story, Bialosky touches on familiar themes-young love, faith, grief and loss, political issues, sexuality-and intersperses vignettes from her life with the works of Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Sharon Olds. Readers will learn about how the "personal and communal" aspects of poetry intertwine for her, and will also discover how poems resonated with the author at specific times in her development (e.g., the loneliness of childhood is recalled in a poem by Rilke; as a new mother, Bialosky finds joy in Sylvia Plath's "Nick and the Candlestick"). Bialosky also includes some fascinating facts about the poets themselves (Robert Louis Stevenson loved The Arabian Knights; Emily Dickinson saw the publication of only 12 of her 1,800 poems). Bialosky's memoir is equally an enjoyable learning experience and an intimate rendering of a poet's passion for words. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
All facets of poet, novelist, memoirist, and editor Bialosky's literary pursuits coalesce in this graceful and inspiriting entwinement of memories, poetry, and interpretation. Bialosky substantiates her assertion that poetry is lifesaving with superbly selected poems incisively linked to her experiences and beautifully elucidated. As she recounts her suburban Cleveland childhood shadowed by her father's early death and her mother's depression, Bialosky revisits common first poems, including Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, and remembers being at once enchanted and puzzled by poetry, apt responses at any age. The shock of a field trip that traversed a poor city neighborhood is paired with Langston Hughes' You and Your Whole Race. Sexual awakening and bouts with loneliness are matched with boldly searing lyrics by Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds. Bialosky's dramatic account of sorrows, struggles, and discoveries told with candor and humor propels readers forward, while poems by Louise Bogan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Li-Young Lee, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, Wallace Stevens, and many more instigate contemplation. With brief poet biographies, this is a resplendent and invaluable anthology and an involving, richly illuminating narrative.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"POEMS ARE OFTEN born out of quarrels and quandaries," Jill Bialosky writes in the "Mortality" section of "Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir." This proposition arises from Bialosky's consideration of Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Child Is Father to the Man" ('"The child is father to the man!' / How can he be? The words are wild!") and William Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up." Wordsworth was famous and dead by the time Hopkins read him in confusion and disgust, and both the fight and the Hopkins poem can be paraphrased thus: Why does anyone care what this crazy old coot says? He can't even write a grammatical sentence, etc. That reactionary flash of rejection - out of which flows enough language force to cause a poem to be written - is probably a correlate of the experience of reading poetry, generally. Poems are born out of quarrels and quandaries because thinking poetically is very closely related to thinking critically. A writer departs from prose and moves into poetry because she senses something has gone funky in Denmark (be Denmark the literary archive, society or the poet's body/heart/mind). She seeks language that can mirror the experience of rift or rupture and, simultaneously, correct or fill it with new understanding. Poets, too, get bummed, sometimes very angry, when they read poems they don't immediately understand (a lot of poems if not most). It's what we do with the dyspeptic feeling that distinguishes us from non-poets. "You like it under the trees in autumn / Because everything is half dead," Wallace Stevens writes in "The Motive for Metaphor." And I think, That is weird. That is kinky. I, too, am lost, and find myself under the trees in autumn, liking it. All this to say, I am not sure I understand the stated premises of either Bialosky's book or Matthew Zapruder's "Why Poetry" : that the reaction I describe above - an erotic push-pull with language that poets revel in and non-poets might find uncomfortable - can and should be overcome. Bialosky is the editor/gatekeeper of the hallowed Norton poetry list, which includes the Norton anthologies that begin and end the poetry education of many American students. She is also a wellknown poet and memoirist in her own right. The book's title and structure are everything. "Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir." Each section - a random sampling includes "Danger," "Memory," "Death," "First Love" and the abovementioned "Mortality" - pairs a basic reading of a poem or two or three with a short narrative about the situation and significance of the poems in Bialosky's life. ("Mortality," the Hopkins-Wordsworth section, curiously, relates to Bialosky's late-life care of her mother; the epic shifts in understanding that occur as one moves from daughter to mother, child to adult to childlike again; and the slow discovery of the humanity of our parents and elders, rather than dealing with the problem of literary ambition or coming to voice that I see as central to the conversation between the two poems. But that proves one of her main points: "A poem doesn't just have one life or one influence on a single life." We are different, Jill Bialosky and I, and we read through our self-goggles.) The poems she chooses are mostly well known. I did not catalog them, but I wondered whether they were not all crossreferenceable in a Norton anthology. That isn't a dig. These poems were lovingly chosen - treasures - and I soften toward the book's conceit when I consider that. We are comrades in our sense that poetry is a kind of gift, there for anyone to take. Still, the notion that generates such an anthologymemoir, the idea that poems must be filtered through a scrim of ordinary language and life in order for us to commune with them, in order that they be "understood" in some definite way, is wrongheaded and, indeed, condescending. Bialosky gets it, but you don't? When I was really mad reading the book, which I was frequently, it was because I was quite sure Bialosky doesn't get it, or quite sure at least that we don't get any of the same stuff of life from being in poetry. I've already said that being mad can be a generative experience when it comes to poetry. First the feels, then a rush of thinking. But emotional engagement with a poem is incomplete engagement. The words and workings of a great poem, an independent artifact, traject outside. It's actually not about you. Bialosky's readings of some poems that I, too, like - Langston Hughes's "I, Too," offered under the section title "Shame," a true editorial blunder; the stunning Sylvia Plath poem (Plath! whose life poetry could not save, sacrificed!) "Poppies in October," under "Depression" - are marred by unaddressed questions of Bialosky's position as a white woman whose cultural power affects and skews her relationship to words. Shame? Why would a serious reading of "I, Too" be consumed by recollection of a primal scene of white guilt? How does the life work to make words mean differently? What is the relationship between meaning and experience? These questions are posed by the book and dropped when they get hot. MATTHEW ZAPRUDER WANTS US to get that poets deal in the archival set of common understandings about cognitive and sensory disorder in human language (an art of producing dis-understanding in order to know things better). If this is true - and I think it is true - I have the same question for him that I have for Jill Bialosky: Who is the audience for this book? He writes, convincingly, rather beautifully: "Poetry is a constructed conversation on the frontier of dreaming. It is a mechanism by which the essential state of reverie can be made available to our conscious minds. ... Poems make possible a conscious entry into the preconscious mind, a lucid dreaming." Elsewhere he describes the effect of poetry on the mind as "dreamlike," "associative," a "drifting feeling." What he calls, fittingly, the poetry "machine," the poem itself, constitutes these effects and also enacts them in a kind of zoned-out feedback loop. (In my experience, in the act of writing a poem, it's not clear where the formal and structural intentions or ideas I bring for the poem end and "drift" begins, or vice versa. Rather than "drift," I think of the mind-state of composition, only partially achievable as an end-user of the poem, as being inside the mind-state of the particular poem, which is a state of willed or controlled subconscious dwelling. Perhaps this state is the opposite of dreaming and is, instead, an experience of what Emerson called practical power.) Zapruder's book makes me think of all this, and because of that I think it is a roaring success. Is it necessary? Is it designed primarily to be purchased and read by students being introduced to the reasons for and methods of reading poetry? I don't know. Zapruder is an editor at Wave Books - publisher of, among other excellent things, "What Is Poetry (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews From the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983-2009)," edited by Anselm Berrigan, which can be seen as a book of common prayer of late 20 th- and 21st-century innovative poetry, a new classic for the ones who already know the songs. I understand Zapruder's interest in preaching to the unconverted. I suspect he is a terrific teacher. His readings of poems are subtle and convincing. I found myself thinking, "Gosh, I never saw that obvious thing in quite that way before," many times during my reading, which is precisely what should happen when reading about literature: We are humbled by its operations on our own minds and the need for others to read with us. While the formulation and reformulation of "Poetry is"-type sentences is the problematic problem that I refuse at the center of both these books, I loved many of Zapruder's phrases. They struck me as fresh and true: "The poem makes poetry happen in the mind of the reader or listener. It happens first to the poet, and in the course of writing, the poet eventually makes something, a little machine, one that for the reader produces discoveries, connections, glimmers of expression." Lovely. Take all of this with a grain of salt. I am not a professional reviewer of books. I am a poet and a teacher of literature. There is no separation at all between my life - as a human, a woman, a black woman, a mother, a working person deeply involved and interested in the political economies of intellectual life - and my work. I work to live. As a result, I'm in the take-it-or-leave-it school of poetry making and reading. Poetry isn't magical or removed from dirty, compromising political and personal acts, pettiness, racism, sexism, suffering. Absent the intervention of many other sociopolitical acts, poetry won't save your life. To suggest otherwise is a kind of offense against poetry's insistence on complexity, the multidimensionality of understanding. Taking it seriously as a carrier of information about the real matrix between language and power, which is truly upsetting - mind-blowing - when we come near to it, changes the way you live. Believe it. Simone white's most recent volume of poetry is "Of Being Dispersed." Her new collection of criticism and poems, "Dear Angel of Death," will be published in September.
Kirkus Review
A celebrated poet, novelist, memoirist, and editor returns with an account of a life lived to the music of poetry.Norton executive editor Bialosky (The Players, 2015, etc.) traces her life by discussing poems that are significant to her or that comment in some fashion on life's various mileposts. Beginning with early childhood and Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," she continues to the present, pausing to focus on specific works and, in some cases, on the lives of poets. Her sections are short and focused"Discovery," "Shame," "Depression," "Sexuality," "Ancestors"and many of the works and poets will be familiar to most readers: Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shakespeare, Keats, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens. But Bialosky introduces some artists who are less familiar in the popular culture: Stanley Plumly, Eavan Boland, Adam Zagajewski. The author uses this format to deal with moments of joy, crisis, surprise, and horror in her life, including the dawning awareness of her love for poetry, the death of her father, the ensuing frustrations of her mother, the struggle to find love, her loss of two newborns, and the suicide of her little sistera loss Bialosky wrote about in History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life (2011). At times, when the poet's life is especially relevant, she will tell us a bit about that person (Sylvia Plath); at other times, she offers very little biography (Edwin Arlington Robinson). Although her conception and presentation are fresh and original, Bialosky sometimes slips on a clich lying in her pathe.g., her blood ran cold when she first read Anne Frank; seeing an attractive young man caused her to feel "like a Christmas tree all lit up." Thankfully, such bumps in the road are infrequent. An emotional, sometimes-wrenching account of how lines of poetry can be lifelines. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Bialosky, who is an executive editor at W.W. Norton publishing and the author of several poetry collections, novels, and the best-selling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life, has written an examination of her own life through the poems she has loved. Poetry has been her companion through both the good and horrific moments. This book connects Bialosky's most beloved poems and personal experiences to the universal truths of poetry. The poems she admires most come from a diverse group of poets. She chose Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," which she memorized in the fourth grade and has carried with her as a sort of touchstone of her experience, and also mentions e.e. cummings and -Emily Dickinson, among others. Her tastes are eclectic and not limited to any particular poetic form. VERDICT Bialosky's attention to detail and love of language serve the reader well. This is a book to savor. [See Prepub Alert, 12/19/16.]-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
