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A Sun Within a Sun: The Power and Elegance of Poetry
by Claire Chi Ah Lyu
Poetry to Inspire
A review by Wade Edwards
If Baudelaire had the popular reach of Dr. Phil, this book would be an instant bestseller, so inspirational is its message, so articulate its conclusions. In evocative prose and far-reaching scholarship, Lyu attempts to distill the astounding, impulsive power of poetry -- its spiritual value, its serious frivolity -- and succeeds beautifully. Poetry, Lyu writes in her powerful prologue, "insists that we abandon and awaken from the deceptive comforts of habit and addiction. Risk is the willingness to open up the limited and limiting circle of the familiar and the easy..." Her learned study is itself a risk, an apologia of sorts for a life lived in the seemingly meaningless company of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Henry Miller, among others. For Lyu, whose chapters overflow with close readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, confronting the charm of poetry entails confronting the reader herself. Poems make us better, she argues, because poetry breeds honesty: "Most often, ridding ourselves of what we dislike lies beneath the threshold of consciousness, and we do not realize that our strategies to curtail pain lead to greater suffering." But since "poetry shifts us from minimal to maximal living, it gives us the chance to know our selves intimately." Poetry, then, is the source of power, the source of change. The book's lucid, engaging style, its impulse to seek beauty in everyday living, and its sheer emotional appeal to the soul all make A Sun within a Sun a rare and worthwhile enterprise.
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