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."