Each chapter opens with a beautifully described memory. Then Bialosky seamlessly shifts to a famous poem (or two) that expresses what she felt at that time — or that allows her to reflect on the experience. The result is a lovely hybrid that blends her coming-of-age story with engaging literary analysis ... Adults and mature teens will find much to love in this book, which demonstrates how poems can become an integral part of life. It also suggests, on every page, the wisdom and deep compassion that make Bialosky, a longtime editor at W.W. Norton, a tremendous asset both to readers and other writers.
The poems she chooses are mostly well known. I did not catalog them, but I wondered whether they were not all cross-referenceable 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 anthology-memoir, 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 ... 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.
Poetry Will Save Your Life proves an inconsistent read. Bialosky’s own poems are precise, spare and emotionally acute. She writes memoir scenes with a poet’s eye, recalling the immediate sensations of childhood ... Poetry Will Save Your Life wants the reader to believe in poetry as ardently as the author does. Occasionally, its tone verges on preachy, and the structure feels contrived. But Bialosky is at her best when writing about Plath.
Although her conception and presentation are fresh and original, Bialosky sometimes slips on a cliché lying in her path. Thankfully, such bumps in the road are infrequent. An emotional, sometimes-wrenching account of how lines of poetry can be lifelines.
As her superlative title suggests, Bialosky organizes this memoir around 52 poems by such poets as W.H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson and many more that she believes answer Milosz's question admirably...this is a delightfully hybrid book: part anthology, part critical study, part autobiography ... Throughout, Bialosky provides a refreshing tonic to the periodic, exaggerated and self-indulgent reports of poetry's death, difficulty or irrelevance ...structure of the book teaches the reader that a poem is not an object of static perfection to be encountered once and correctly, but rather is an ever-changing occasion for contemplation by various individuals, each with an ongoing life story that yields an array of reactions ... The memoiristic passages, unfortunately, tend to be mundane and mediocre; she paints her autobiographical anecdotes in broad strokes, which makes the various incidents, large and small, feel brushed over.
In Poetry Will Save Your Life, the poet Jill Bialosky endeavors to bottle up the emotional response we readers have to poetry ...is a sketchbook of personal experience through the lens of poetry, as Bialosky illuminates for us the joys and tragedies that have shaped her – saved her – and the poems that have guided her along the way ...book perhaps suffers a bit from the absence of a compelling through-line – the stories and poems are presented in small sketches along many themes, without the momentum or narrative arc that readers have grown to expect in memoirs ... With these gracious intensely personal sketches, her narratives told through the prism of verse, Bialosky convinces us that poetry is alive and ready to breathe with us.
