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Blue Horses: Poems

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The painting was the inspiration behind the title of a bestselling volume of poetry, Blue Horses (2014), by the American poet Mary Oliver. Exactly. She rises above chatter in powerful gems like the last lines of “To Be Human Is To Sing Your Own Song:” Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the colour which must be fought and vanquished by the other two! urn:lcp:bluehorsespoems0000oliv_a3g2:lcpdf:efa9b9f3-ca82-4049-969d-f3fe0d55b64d Foldoutcount 0 Identifier bluehorsespoems0000oliv_a3g2 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t16n2zc36 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781594204791 Any previous exposure I've had to Oliver's poems has been via the internet and I've loved them all, though the first one I came across online remains my favorite of hers:

Compare this to Read, Herbert. A Concise History of Modern Painting. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974 ed.) at 193, describing Marc's associate and fellow Blue Reiter member Kandinsky's work of this time as "Lines fluctuate and represent not only movement, but purpose and growth. Colours are associative not only in the sense that they express human emotion (joy or sadness, etc.) but also in that they signify emotive aspects of our external environment-yellow is earthy, blue is heavenly; yellow is brash and importunate, and upsets people, blue is pure and infinite, suggestive of infinite peace."

Praise

Walker Art Center, Gift of the T.B. Walker Foundation and the Gilbert M. Walker Memorial Fund, 1942.1 As I have made clear, not everything in this slim collection is as strong or as nutritious. But we don’t always come to poetry to be fed with what parents, teachers, mentors and other authority figures think is good for us. Sometimes we come for undemanding pleasure, like in “On Not Mowing the Lawn’’, so that the grasshopper, or we, will “have gliding space.” Animals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that was good in me. The Little Monkey, 1912. (Available as a print.) The Large Blue Horses, 1911. (Available as a print.) I love how the first two lines are almost like a frame-narrative, a gateway into the poem where you have to accept that as the viewer you can step into a painting and engage with it, relate to it, learn from it. Without that belief, the rest of the poem feels less accessible. The horses are the ones to approach Oliver and I think it's key that she says she is 'commingling' with them. She becomes one with the horses, in a sense blends her awareness with theirs. The horses are not "straight-forward" horses, but rather almost like messengers, clearly grand and knowledgeable, but with a fondness and acceptance of our poet.

Wankheit, Klaus and Steffen, Uwe. Briefe aus dem Feld. (Munich: Piper, 1986), 64; Partsch, Susanna. Franz Marc 1880-1916. (Cologne: Taschen, 1991), 38-39; Piper, Reinhard "Franz Marc: On the animal in art" in Das Tier in der Kunst. (Munich: Piper, 1922) included in Partsch, op.cit.Oliver also uses her this book to survey a wide spectrum of spirituality and art, including eastern sensual poetry (“Rumi”), the writings of Lucretius (“After Reading Lucretius, I Go to the Pond”), zodiac signs (which she uses as a jumping-off point to explore her battle with cancer in “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac”), and Hinduism (“To Shiva,” another sharply observed poem about mortality). “First Yoga Lesson” is the best poem of this ilk because it shows the poet confronting her spiritual interests and aging body with humor: Among the paintings he produced in those two ecstatically prolific years just before he was drafted was The Fate of the Animals— an arresting depiction of the interplay of beauty and brutality, terror and tenderness, in the chaos of life. An inscription appeared under the canvas in Marc’s hand: “And all being is flaming agony.” Continuing an artistic renaissance that began with A Thousand Mornings (2012), Mary Oliver’s latest poetry collection, Blue Horses, finds her exploring a new home and rediscovering love. Oliver has long been America’s bestselling poet, and these latest conversational poems show why you can find her work on shelves across the United States. If there is a statement of purpose for Blue Horses, it arrives early in the book with “I Don’t Want to be Demure or Respectable,” in which the poet writes: La Cava, Gabi. Review Article: The Expressionist Animal Painter Franz Marc (April 2004)". Archived from the original on 16 October 2012 . Retrieved 22 June 2012.

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