Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #259347 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 178 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780807068861
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
As Diane Wakoski has noted, the power of Mary Oliver's Frost-influenced pastoral writing is in her ability to cast a spell, to create "the illusion that the natural world is graspable." Oliver's fierce independence, beautiful imagery, and love and knowledge of the natural world are all driven by a searching mind, expressed in poems that make for good company. In Some Questions You Might Ask, Oliver gives us this one to chew over: "Is the soul solid, like iron?/ or is it tender and breakable, like/ the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?" Highly recommended.

From Publishers Weekly
Following by 13 years her National Book Award–winning New and Selected Volume One, this big and very quotable collection offers more of what Oliver's fans revere: optimistic, clear and lyrical explorations of varying ecosystems, (especially the birds, mammals, ponds and forests of the northeastern U.S.) mingled with rapt self-questioning, consolation and spiritual claims some might call prayers. One of the 42 new poems watches ravens on a "morning of green tenderness and/ rain"; others describe a mockingbird, a white heron, an obedient dog, tiger lilies, deer, terns, blueberry fields on Cape Cod (where Oliver lives) and a "Mountain Lion on East Hill Road," glimpsed just "once, years ago." Poems reprinted from six earlier books (beginning with 1994's White Pine) broaden the focus to insect life, to weather and the seasons ("I have talked with the faint clouds in the sky") and to other parts of the U.S.; while most poems use a mellifluous free verse, some choose the simplicities of prose, a form best achieved in Winter Hours (1999). (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal
This collection is drawn from seven previous books and includes 30 new poems (written in 1991 and 1992). Since her Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive ( LJ 2/15/83), Oliver has continued to examine the natural world and its mysteries. There is a delightful, almost naive voice speaking in "A Certain Sharpness in the Morning Air," where encountering a skunk with "the white stripe like a river/ running down its spine" becomes an occasion for celebrating the shaggy "wild life of the fields." Oliver's ability to fashion an image is evident in "Water Snake," where the shy reptile looks at the poet with "gravel eyes" and probes the air with "the feather of his tongue." Other creatures inspire poems, as do lilies, ponds, skunk cabbage, and moccasin flowers. But these are more than odes to nature. Oliver writes with a sure touch and a simple elegance of other concerns: the acceptance of fate, the shortness of life, the inevitability of loss and suffering. Her poems express the human need to be at home in the world until we rise and fall "into something better."-- Francis Poole, Univ. of Delaware Lib., Newark
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Oliver integrates craft and heightened awareness.
Every poem in this book is a gem, and the collection made me want to read her complete works. While this is definitely not "religious poetry" of the greeting card variety, it is an expression of a deep spiritual awareness. Oliver's poems often reveal an amazement and wonder at being alive. Poetic skill and heightened awareness are so well-integrated, those who are looking for well-crafted poetry will certainly find it, and those who are looking for an awakening of consciousness may also find that.

Although Oliver's environment, her field of play, is nature, I wouldn't reduce her to a "naturalist poet." Nature is always interpreted and absorbed by her vision. Nature reveals its secrets to her, but they are the secrets of her own soul. In her poetry, nature is the oracle that reveals the human psyche.

But I should include Oliver's own words, because no prose critique can do justice to the intoxicating natural imagery of her poems. In the poem "Peonies", the richness and fertility of nature mirror the same qualities of the imagination:

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready to break my heart

as the sun rises,

as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open- pools of lace,

white and pink- and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes into the curls,

craving the sweet sap,...

The poem ends with a challenge that reverberates through the book. In spite of the sense of death looming sometimes on the edge of the poem (and our lives), sometimes at the center, are we willing to fully experience life?

Do you love this world?

Do you cherish your humble and silky life?

Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,

and softly,

and exclaiming of their dearness,

fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,

their eagerness

to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are

nothing forever?

Oliver's poetry is an unmasking of the natural world.
Mary Oliver is living proof that poetry is not something that was invented, rather something that has been present since creation, in us and in nature, waiting to be discovered. And for the last thirty years Mary Oliver has not so much written poetry, but searched for, and discovered, the poetry that has existed in the world all along. It is, of course, much more complicated than that. Oliver's poetry is crafted with delicate, precise language. She lays her words out lazily across the page, often breaking the poem into three or four beat lines, letting a metaphor string out through an entire stanza. It is her imagery, her close observance of the world, that leads to the "ideas" in her poems. There is a moment in nearly all of her poems where the speaker moves from the exterior to the interior, from the water-lily cracking open to the creases in the human heart. What makes her poetry work is that none of this seems forced. It is as if she is taking the reader by the hand and saying, "Look! The sun is rising. Watch it with me for a moment and we'll decide for ourselves why it rises. For certainly, it must have its reasons."

Breathtaking clarity, sanity, and tender love of this world
Mary Oliver's poem "The Journey" came into my life when I was seriously ill and in desperate need of permission to rest. That poem became a talisman, a mentor, a voice ringing with sanity. I have shared it with many, many people over the last 10 years.... I've yet to encounter another poet whose voice is as pure, clear, lucid, and present. Mary's poems combine all the wonder of early childhood with the exquisite vision and discernment of someone who deeply, minutely, wildly loves Creation. Her poems are blessings, nothing less.