Because I Praise [Paperback]

Maryhelen Snyder (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1998

Poetry embodying a woman's vision of the world. The author is a psychologist, a family therapist, and some of the work in this books draws upon that experience.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Maryhelen Snyder is a poet, teacher, and psychotherapist. Her poetry and prose has appeared in numerous literary magazines, as well as in professional journals relating to psychotherapy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Watermelon Mountain Press, 1998; First Edition edition (May 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0966807308
• ISBN-13: 978-0966807301
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,910,058 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Praise for Praise, May 16, 2001

By 

Peter Pitzele "asher 65" (Bay Shore, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Because I Praise (Paperback)

Let's begin with this:

Driving into Rainlight

Into the dark drift of rainlight pours an infusion

of pulsing light. Like a calf newborn and wet

on the floor of the world, it throbs

in the drenched air, dissolves the gray weight

of untimely nightfall, returns green to green,

and gives back to the intricate things

of the world their particular shapes and shadows.

As we drive, you speak through the sheath

we have each wrapped around us. I listen,

my hands on the wheel, my eyes unveering.

Suddenly you tell, in a language we barely

remember, the truth of yourself. Light

on the watery air turns silver.

It is a poet's gift to be able to speak to us in the "language we barely remember," a language in which there is a light of truth like the light that breaks between these two travellers and in the world around them.

Note the lucidity of this poem, how the "intricate" observation of the external world sets up and resonates with a specific, even prosasic moment of true communication. The paired acts of the final stanza---listening and speaking---are common enough skills, but in this poet they are raised to an uncommon level. ("Unveering" is the only word to hint of an extraordinary concentration of attention, perhaps the medium for the disclosure that follows.) She takes the ordinary into another dimension as if, by her gifts of observation, she could slow time down and amplify the casual until it revealed its significance and awakened a spontaneous impulse of praise.

The style of this poetry does not send us to a dictionary; we do not need to parse and puzzle over lines. But the music in this poetry---alliterative, full of internal echoes and rhymes, the interplay of consonant and vowels opening and closing---bears reading and reading again and aloud. These poems convey a sense of delight in language that makes them a delight to share. In one poem the poet gives thanks for "the slick oil of language," ( a distant echo of Hopkins perhaps) and she clearly loves this slippery medium which can coat objects and make them gleam: "Light / on the watery air turns silver."

The poems of Because I Praise narrate a life in the unique manner of poetry, in glimpses and fragments that give a sense of a whole, of the heart and temper of a woman---mother, child, lover, daughter, pilgrim---living her own very intimate, unqiue existence, living her grief, her losses, her discoveries, her confrontations with age. But she has come to sing, and she writes in priase, a priase hard-won, without cliche, ringing, uplifting.

Poor poets who do not have big names. How hard it is for them to find their readers. Try this little book. It will touch your heart.