Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53722 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 170 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780803259782
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Now the 13th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the Iowa-born, Nebraska-based Kooser has 40 years' experience in constructing verse. Like Wallace Stevens, Kooser was for many years an insurance executive, and begins chapter one with the following admonition: "You'll never be able to make a living writing poems." The soundness of that advice sets the tone for this no-nonsense book, which "advocates for poems that can be read and understood without professional interpretation." To that end, he offers plenty of examples from contemporary poets like Jane Hirschfield and B.H. Fairchild (as well as from his own work), explaining uses of rhyme, meter, imagery and other fundamentals without resorting to overly technical language. He stresses the use of judicious detail (which has its source in close observation), and shows, with subtlety, how and when one might shift from metaphor to simile, or vice versa. The last of 12 chapters stresses time as the greatest help in editing: "leave your poem alone until it looks as if someone else might have written it." Perhaps the most important feature of the book is Kooser's voice, which comes through clearly and evenly, with little patience for cant, but a clear desire to advise those starting down a largely thankless path. "The truth is," he writes, "nobody's waiting for you to press your poetry into their hands."
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From Booklist
The work of Kooser, America's new poet laureate, will be receiving more attention now, attention that is amply deserved. As this collection of essays shows, he is a generous presence in the poetic world, one who feels that poets' "job description" (which he discusses in the book's first essay) is not to make money or even fame, but to "serve the poems we write." While encouraging poets to think of their audience as they write, and to revise toward intelligibility, he does not prescribe who that audience will be. His own work tends toward the rural and populist, but he does not disdain those whose audience will be urban and urbane. Rather, he urges poets to focus on the work of poetry rather than on the idea of being a poet. His advice, useful to poets at any level of achievement, includes both broad and specific ideas on revising, and enlightening discussion of matters ranging from the often-underestimated power of simile to employing narrative effectively. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"It is not a how-to book or a grand manifesto about poetic tradition. This lively and trim book is Kooser''s gift to readers and writers of poetry."-Bloomsbury Review (Bloomsbury Review )

"Useful to poets at any level of achievement."-Booklist (Booklist )

"This is the rare handbook that will support developing poets and energize poets already practicing the craft, and is a must-have for instructors of poetry. Though Kooser didn't need to write it, new poets will be grateful that this master chose to share his wisdom."-ForeWord Magazine (ForeWord Magazine )

"The Poetry Home Repair Manual is brief, lucid, and often remarkably wise."-David Mason, Weekly Standard (David Mason Weekly Standard )