Poetry Will Save Your Life

Jill Bialosky has found a creative way to write about her personal experiences and make them interesting to a wider audience.  If you are a poetry enthusiast, you will enjoy reading her memoir, Poetry Will Save Your Life.

I must admit that poetry has never really spoken to me, so there a few poems that I have learned over the years, mainly for school assignments that I recognized in this book.  There are a few that brought back fond memories of my mother, because she did like poems and Robert Louis Stevenson, who is ddquoted int his book was one of her favorites.  "My Shadow" and "The Swing" were poems my mother loved to recite to me when I was a child.

Bialosky writes each chapter in this book about different stages and experiences in her life.  In each instance she uses a poet and their poetry to relate to her frame of mind and emotions in those circumstances.  It is interesting that there is a poet and poems to fit all different situations in life.   When you are happy or sad, about marriage and loss of a pregnancy and even suicide.  Though looking at the book as a whole, there are more poems about the unhappy experiences in life than the happy ones, or do we just look for something to fulfill us when we are down?

Growing up Jewish Bialosky even can relate to the psalms and poems of Jewish poets for inspiration and soloace.  She quotes Psalm 23, "The Lord Is My Shepard..." which we are all so familiar with and   the Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, who as a child immigrated from Germany under Hitler's regime, to Palestine with his Orthodox family.  His poetry including, My child blossoms sadly", "carries the anguished reverberations of history and politics", says Jill Bialosky.

Though we do not share the same favorite poets, Bialosky says in an interview that her favorites are Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens, this was an interesting quick book to read.  If you are moved by the poems she has chosen you may even enjoy it in a more personal way than I did.