rewarding and insightful essays on poetry by a poet

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	• Poetry's Old Air (Poets on Poetry) Marianne Boruch University of Michigan Press, 1995 - 160 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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rewarding and insightful essays on poetry by a poet

"The essay is a curious form," remarks Boruch in her introduction, "closer in its meditative possibilities to poetry than is usually imagined. So it seems natural to work toward it as one might work toward a poem, with reverence for mystery and accident." These nine essays bear out this proposal admirably, engaging the reader with their intimate and colloquial intelligence, worthy companions to the voice of Boruch's own poems in her four volumes (Descendant, View from the Gazebo, Moss Burning, and A Stick that Breaks and Breaks). A professor of English and creative writing at Purdue University, Boruch writes about Dickenson, Frost, Hopkins, Bishop and Plath with an earned grace and a sensitivity to the surprise and accident and messiness that go into lives and poems and which make both possible at all. The title essay opens, as all of them do, conversationally: "This past year I bought a bicycle at a yard sale," and we are off, now recalling with the author an autumn from decades ago, now being mistaken for someone else in a Maine post office, as we move into and around poems that apprehend us in their insight and skill. The essays that rise from these homely beginnings follow the track famous poems leave in memory and association as Boruch examines lines a poet discarded before a final draft, or marvels at the linkages between words and the ways we move through this world. In Poetry's Old Air, Dickinson Descending, Poetry and Its Rubble, Hopkins by Heart, Thirst and Patience, Plath's Bees, The Sound of It, On Metaphor and The Quiet House, the author writes "to understand the work of others, giving myself plenty of time to stare and to figure." These essays deserve readers who wish to do the same.

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Marianne Boruch is one of America's finest contemporary poets, and as she demonstrates in Poetry's Old Air, she is also a marvelous essayist. Weaving together close readings, biographical detail, and personal reflections, Boruch meditates on a universal fascination: how a poem comes to exist.
A variety of imaginative approaches sets the essays apart from strictly academic poetry criticism. Boruch's ear for metaphor and attention to everyday experience enrich her readings of others' work. The unique connections she draws to the world beyond the literary one- including comparisons to painting and ceramics, the habits of bees, and the basic elements of musical composition- bring other ways of seeing and thinking to bear on the writing process itself. Instead of building her arguments and observations around a single thesis, Boruch borrows freely from other areas of human knowledge and experience, allowing essays to develop gradually and "waywardly," as a poem is made.
Poets, teachers of literature, and students of writing and literature, as well as the general reader, will appreciate the insights of Poetry's Old Air, as will the general reader, for whom these essays are entirely accessible.
Marianne Boruch is the author of three acclaimed volumes of poetry: Moss Burning, Descendant, and View from the Gazebo. She is Associate Professor of English, Purdue University.

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