Poetry Will Save Your Life by Jill Bialosky

Author:Jill Bialosky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

* * *

This poem shimmies down the page, one line after the other, the lines breaking as thought might break. The poem tells the narrator’s story of turning off the road and witnessing two ponies coming out of the field to welcome him and his friend. They step over the fence to greet the two ponies. They can “hardly contain their happiness,” upon seeing them. “They love each other. / There is no loneliness like theirs,” the narrator tells us, suggesting that implicit in love is loneliness. Witnessing the two ponies in love is internalized, and in describing the sensation, the narrator expresses the idea that if he stepped out of his body, he would “break into blossom.” In “A Blessing,” love—whether platonic or romantic—is a form of “blossoming,” the same as the blossoming of a flower or a tree, and reading the poem fills me with the wonder of this phenomenon. Is this a love poem or a nature poem? No matter. A love poem can be disguised within a nature poem.

Of writing, Wright said in an interview, “Sometimes there is a force of life like the spring which mysteriously takes shape without your even having asked it to take shape, and this is frightening, it is terribly frightening. It has happened maybe a few times to me—times when I’ve been able to get the poem finished in almost nothing flat. . . . A poem called “Father,” a poem called “A Blessing.” Where did they come from? If you were to ask me that question, I would have to say, how should I know? Being a poet sometimes puts you at the mercy of life, and life is not always merciful.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.