Pulitzer-prize winning poet and National Book Award winner, Mary Oliver, provides a graceful manual on the mechanics of poetical composition. ?Poets and those who simply want to understand poetry will enjoy this study of poetry as a conscious craft. ?Breaking down the basics with examples from well-known poems, Oliver shows how the dimensions of sound and rhythm (musicality) and lyrical words (assonance, alliteration, etc. ) can combine to make powerful verse. She enables readers to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure that intensify both the poem's narrative and its ideas. "