Mary Oliver(1935-2019), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, is one of the most celebrated and best-selling poets in America. She wrote over 30 volumes of poetry and prose, including Blue Iris, Owls and Other Fantasies, Why I Wake Early, two volumes of New and Selected Poems, and Devotions, as well as two essay collections, Long Life and Upstream.
"One of the astonishing aspects of Oliver's work is the consistency of tone over this long period. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets... There is no complaint in Ms. Oliver's poetry, no whining, but neither is there the sense that life is in any way easy... These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward." Stephen Dobyns, New York Times Book Review "I have always thought of poems as my companions - and like companions, they accompany you wherever the journey (or the afternoon) might lead... My most recent companion has been Mary Oliver's "The Leaf and the Cloud"... It's a brilliant meditation, a walk through the natural world with one of our preeminent contemporary poets." Rita Dove, Washington Post"
"One of the astonishing aspects of Oliver's work is the consistency of tone over this long period. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets... There is no complaint in Ms. Oliver's poetry, no whining, but neither is there the sense that life is in any way easy... These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward." Stephen Dobyns, New York Times Book Review "I have always thought of poems as my companions - and like companions, they accompany you wherever the journey (or the afternoon) might lead... My most recent companion has been Mary Oliver's "The Leaf and the Cloud"... It's a brilliant meditation, a walk through the natural world with one of our preeminent contemporary poets." Rita Dove, Washington Post"
This collection brings together poetry from eight of Oliver's previously published books and 30 new poems. In all of her work, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive , Oliver, ``full of curiosity,'' writes about the natural world, engaging the entwined processes of life and death. ``Amazement'' figures in her persistent attention to things seen: ``If you notice anything / it leads you to notice / more / and more.'' Description then leads to meditation, a leap beyond the material world. Fundamentally religious in impulse, many of the poems move quickly away from concrete description. Metaphors are not quite grounded in the real; rather, they are asserted, declared. Of a bear the one poem's speaker notes, ``all day I think of her-- / her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.'' Even though this bear flicks the grass with her tongue, sharpens her claws against the ``silence/of the trees,'' the reader cannot quite see her. It's as if Oliver reports on mysteries rather than embodying them. And so, despite its undeniable music, her work too often becomes rhetorical; too often its earnestness turns preachy and its feeling becomes sentimental. (Oct.)
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