Product Details
Evidence: Poems

Evidence: Poems
By Mary Oliver

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Product Description

Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” Evidence is a collection of forty-seven new poems on all of Mary Oliver’s classic themes. She writes perceptively about grief and mortality, love and nature, and the spiritual sustenance she draws from their gifts. Ever grateful for the bounty that is offered to us daily by the natural world, Oliver is attentive to the mysteries it imparts. The arresting beauty she finds in rivers and stones, willows and field corn, the mockingbird’s “embellishments” or the last hours of darkness permeates her poems. Her newest volume is imbued through and through with that power of nature to, in Oliver’s words, “excite the viewers toward sublime thought.”
 
Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Oliver is a skilled guide to the rarest and most exquisite insights of the natural world. “After a few hours in her quiet, exuberant presence,” writes Los Angeles Times columnist Susan Salter Reynolds, “one feels as though the raw sunlight in the room, the brightness of the water, the white wood and flashing wings outside the window are bleaching unimportant details from the day.” From one of America’s most loved and respected poets, this new volume plumbs the evidence of our most profound mysteries.
 
 

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #13975 in Books
  • Published on: 2009-04-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 88 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
Oliver has been publishing poetry collections since 1963, and her latest is gloriously alive, inquisitive, and welcoming. A prolific and cherished poet, she makes readers feel as though they’ve been part of the quest for wisdom and grace she records in her lucid, giving, prayerful poems. Oliver writes of meditative walks and moments of radiant recognition. Gratitude is the mode here, and sustained attention is the vehicle, as acknowledged with her signature clarity in two of many bird poems. In “Empty Branch in the Orchard,” the poet waits, year after year, for the return of a hummingbird; in “Snowy Egret,” she writes of one who “has come again to the shallows in front of my house / as he has for forty years.” There it is: what we long for, and what we hold dear. Within each lifting lyric, Oliver declares all of life holy. She affirms her poetry habit, “The comforts / of language / are true / and deep.” And she reminds us that, in spite of anguish and loss, “to have loved / is everything.”

Review
'These are life-enhancing and redemptive poems that coax the sublime from the subliminal' - Sally Connolly, Poetry

Review

“The work of Mary Oliver is one of those rare and lovely convergences. She is a lyric artist with a riveted eye and an enormous heart, one of the nation’s great spiritual sentinels.”
—Brian Doyle, Christian Century
 
“Mary Oliver is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making.  The humbling effect of that perspective is her lasting gift to readers.”
—Harvard Review
 
“I should be clear that Mary Oliver is, to my mind, one of the most gifted American poets working in English today. In her hands, the language acquires a lucidity approaching translucence; the accuracy of her vision and the precision of her voice are unique in their refreshing simplicity. Perhaps most singular is the tendency of her poems to be at once powerful and appealing; an affection for the natural world and a sympathy toward the reader abide.”
 —Katherine Hollander, Pleiades

Customer Reviews

Still So Strong5
This newest volume of Mary Oliver's poetry is as good as any she has published. It is experience, thought, and feeling distilled as few can do so well as Oliver. She has managed to eliminate even more adjectives than in earlier poems. She can look at the complexity of life, including its pain, and still rise to praise.

Mary Oliver at her best5
I came across Mary Oliver's poetry a few years ago and eagerly awaited this new collection. I think it's brilliant. I wasn't that impressed with her collection entitled Thirst. I found it a bit too religious. This one (Evidence) is a delight. There's a brightness and liveliness to a lot of the poems, combined with some very moving sections - I don't know how she does it but she can tug at my heart in the space of just one line sometimes! Remarkable poet and I highly recommend this wondeful new collection.

Evidence: Poems4
Mary Oliver's poetry has an almost Zen-like precision as she gazes at the natural world. and the poems in this volume are no exception. Fans of her earlier poetry will still fine the short lines and vivid images that have made her one of the best-known poets in the U.S. Newcomers will find the influence of Dickinson, Frost and W.C. Williams to be quite prevalent in her verse. Overall, Evidence is an enjoyable collection of lyric poetry.

Not all the poems in this collection are destined to be long-remembered, however. Oliver can sometimes slip into a voice that tries to pass off familiar wisdom as deep insight. She can also be quite sentimental at times, though at other times her vision is ice hard. Her spirituality veers from the orthodox Christian to the new age mystic, but both are always at the service of an adoration of nature; she seems to me to be a pantheist in Christian garb. These issues, though, did not prevent me from enjoying the collection.