Indeed I Was Pleased With the World

by Mary Ruefle

Poets of astonishing vision are rare. Mary Ruefle is of their number. Her poems discover the full beauty and anguish of life that most of us dare not see, much less depict in luminous detail for the ages.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 2007

About the author

Mary Ruefle is an American poet and essayist. The daughter of a military officer, Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh in 1952, but spent her early life traveling around the U.S. and Europe. She graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in Literature.

Ruefle's work has been widely published in literary journals. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ruefle currently lives in New England. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College and is visiting faculty with the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/50-...

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

from Indeed I Was Pleased with the World by Mary Ruefle:

Grief


First, it will comfort you to know there are crows.
And calipers for measuring the amount of sunshine
that can escape from under the shadows
of thought. Far out at sea ships go down
in a crippled light, and bunches of black iris
are sent to the remaining crew.
You, too, shall have lived and died
a jot, with the queer feeling you were vast and
ageless, with a good education in sleep, prepared
to die with one regret, that you could not devote
more years in vain. And no one could do nothing
but let it happen. Whatever was tied to the mast
the waves have come-- here they are:
after anxiety turns into pain and pain
turns into rain and the rain
into a doorbell on the face,
the forehead splits open.
Crows come for that speck of gold
you were saving for you eyelids at the point of death
and turn away, wildly happy.

[Laura B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

mary ruefle is a poetry allstar and this book is a perfect example of why. these poems are so terse and tense, with such clipped little moments feeling, suddenly huge.

[Abraham · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I started reading James Tate I thought: Oh, I get it now, I see what this anti-poetry thing is all about. There was real pleasure in the absurdities he presented, and I got the sense that it was a necessary poke in the side to keep us from getting too carried away with ourselves, and that maybe the mad, poetic rush for meaning and affect was best served by the careless linebreak and the random image. I started looking at Dean Young and others with a new attitude, and I picked up a book of Mary Ruefele's. I didn't love it, but was told to try this one, and have just finished it. I don't get it. Either I'm too fixated on a traditional poetic angling toward meaning or this doesn't speak to anything. The blurbs on the back suggest the book gets at "the anguish of life". I don't see it at all. Where? It feels random and overwrought with cleverness.

Although some of it is very clever. For that it at least deserves three stars.

[cori · Rating 4 out of 5]

"kiss of the sun" (27) -
"if, as they say, poetry is a sign of something
among people, then let this be prearranged now,
between us, while we are still peoples: that
at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry
(and wheat and evil and insects and love),
when the entire human race gathers in the flesh,
reconstituted down to the infant's tiniest fold
and littlest nail, i will be standing at the edge
of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you,
reconstituted down to its innermost seed protected
by white thread, in case you are thirsty, which
does not at this time seem like a wild guess,
and though there will be no poetry between us then,
at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas,
i hope you will take it, and remember on earth
i did not know how to touch it it was all so raw,
and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd
or anything else so that i am of it
i will take the orange and toss it as high as i can."

[Boxhuman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just found part of my notes from two years ago when I read this book! They're not complete, but I'm grateful anyway.

"One day I read a scientific journal: there are no penguins at one pole, no bears/on the other. These two, who were so long intimates/in my mind, began to drift apart, each on his own floe,/far out into glacial seas." from How I Became Impossible

"I see the windshield of a car/smashed in the street, its silver/loosed like the sea itself." from The Imperial Ambassador of the Infinite

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of odd, surprising pleasures in this one. Here, the speaker tells about looking through a dictionary:

...I noticed 'rainbow' / follows 'rain' in the book, just as it does on / earth, and I noticed it was silly of me to / notice so much...

[Moira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Indeed I was pleased with this collection, har har

Fascinating! Definitely need to go through a few more times before class... (I can't believe it ends on the image of a pregnant baby that then gives birth to the world) (can you spoil poetry?)

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

from My Timid Eternity: "bless you, you are more lonesome / than either the General or I."

[Susan Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book!

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely, enjoyable poetry.

[Megan RFA · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were several gems, but overall fell short for me.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Forgetting that people even exist.
Of all his joys, this must be the deepest."

[Hans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Ruefle's writing harmonizes with my brain.

(I almost forgot to mention the dedication page note: "for the woman on the plane / who helped me remove my coat")

[Kim Lohse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of her best books--full of homeruns.

[cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think you should read this book.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

America's best poet, bar none.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am filled with animus. I dislike so much poetry. I dislike so much poetry like this poetry - natural feelings, feeling natural, eggs, painters, relying on Shakespeare and Dickinson's schticks, domestic blessings. But I don't dislike this at all. Even when it fails I am unruffled. It's sharp and ambiguous enough for me, just.

I passed southwards through narrow passes
I came to a clearing
They had written my name with clouds:
Mother Of All Hideous Things

In Middleton they’ve never seen a linden
or heard the nightingale.
They don't know who Franz Josef is, or was.
Even Lincoln is only something tall and black,
with a small circle of blood
on his shirt front, signifying
the sun. Paper is something
that can be burned,
and under its high-rising smoke
the rooftop antennas tremble.
Will the world be brought in tonight,
and given water and hay?
A few teenagers hope so
in the glass donut shop on Main Street

Walpurgisnacht, my birthday:

Birds grow in the garden here–
their little beaks push up the dirt
and the oxygen stuns their beady eyes,
a feather unfurls on the stalk of a neck
and in the darkness
of the early hours of April 30th
a breast so bright it could swallow a bee–
even so, there’s a universal dread
right here in our own quarter-acre–
what if the dead come next?
And want breakfast?
And to divide the light?

Here, mostly

[Noah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Indeed I was pleased with this book.