Blue Horses: Poems

Product Information

Blue Horses or Die grossen blauen Pferde ( The Large Blue Horses) is a 1911 painting by German painter and printmaker Franz Marc (1880–1916). Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-12-10 01:25:18 Boxid IA40001504 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier 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. Swiss painter Jean Bloé Niestlé (1884–1942) urged Marc to "capture the essence of the animal." [7] According to art historian Gabi La Cava, for Marc, "the feeling that is evoked by the subject matter is most important"—more so than zoological accuracy. [8] Provenance [ edit ]

She begins by separating what her parents did from what she did, and it is wonderfully vague about when she decided to put words to this, and how angry she was at being expected to do things their way. Adults come to grips with binding/unbinding, and artists, with words or other tools, are a large part of the sorting out. Oliver’s tone here works perfectly, validating what anyone trying to grow up has to struggle with. Yes, she says. It stays with you. And paying attention to the sparrow–as opposed to just one’s inner angst– helps keep anger from being destructive as it breaks away from being hobbled by any obstacle. The whole poem is strong and rewarding. Here Oliver says what every “decider” needs to face, deep within her or his heart, We should prefer to die rather than to explain to any living creature exactly what war is. So we have a poem that is both richly imaginative and as political as the best antiwar cri de Coeur. Like so much of her work, it is an uncommonly direct yet beguiling love letter to vitality itself, poured from the soul of someone utterly besotted with this world which we too are invited to embrace. 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.) is the piece of God that is inside each of us.'This is stunning and I think a key theme in Oliver's poetry. She believes wholeheartedly in the good and the beautiful, in beauty for beauty's sake, despite the cruelty and the malice we are also capable of. And this comes from a little piece of the divine in us, of something outside ourselves that is good. Being Christian myself, I do like this idea, but I can also imagine that for non-religious readers that perhaps doesn't strike entirely true.

Praise

Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” wrote Mary Oliver in one of the masterpiece from her suite of poems celebrating the urgency of aliveness, Blue Horses ( public library). What I Can Do,” comes next and it is a gripe about how confusing she finds operating a television, a clothes washer and cell phones. The last line announces that she can strike a match and light a fire, the kind of statement better suited to the late Philip Whalen, a Buddhist priest. In “I Don’t Want To Be Demure or Respectable,” she declares : There is no doubt that this is how Oliver will be remembered. Her outlook in this slim, attractive book remains positive, never cloying, and is tinged with welcome humor and even sadness as she approaches death -- though as fitting with her persona, she turns that into affirmation as well. Some critics cast Oliver as demure or preachy, and perhaps there was evidence for those claims in her earlier works. However, with A Thousand Mornings, she stepped away from that position into generous spiritual and personal musings, a trend she continues with this most recent book. 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."

The painting was the inspiration behind the title of a bestselling volume of poetry, Blue Horses (2014), by the American poet Mary Oliver. With each of her volumes in the past five years, Mary Oliver has grown more personal and transparent, which has benefited her work. Her recent poems are less concerned with her critics and more concerned with celebrating the diverse sensual and spiritual pleasures life can offer. Blue Horses is a sweet, friendly collection and the kind of book that will continue to endear Oliver to readers. In our final "part" of the poem, Oliver is now surrounded by all four horses and while they can't speak their message, Oliver can perhaps intuit it. Their beauty, otherworldly as it is, is their whole purpose and that is enough. They are meant to give the viewer beauty, a moment of rest and perhaps a moment of connection. For those who want more, who want the horses to mean something more clear or more defined, Oliver asks what you could possible expect. In a world where young people die too soon with a bullet in the head, in which this occurs not just once but countless of times, what could there horses possibly do except be beautiful and themselves? I don't think I realized that Mary Oliver had come out with another volume of poetry, but she's one of my favorites, and when I saw it at the public library I snagged it right away.Within a month of painting them, Marc was dead — a shell explosion in the first days of the war’s longest battle sent a metal splinter into his skull, killing him instantly while a German government official was compiling a list of prominent artists to be recalled from military service as national treasures, with Marc’s name on it. The Fate of the Animals, 1913. In “What We Want,” she provides a presumptuous manifesto in a few lines, and anyone familiar with her earlier poems will see what she almost always aims for, and succeeds in achieving :