|
|
|
1.
|
|
Photographs and prose from the world Molly Malone Cook and poet Mary Oliver shared for forty years Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, is one of the most celebrated poets in America. Her partner Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005, was a photographer and pioneer gallery owner. Intertwining Oliver’s prose with Cook’s photographs, Our World is an intimate testament to their life together. The poet’s moving text captures not only the unique qualities of her partner’s work, but the very texture of their shared world.
...
|
|
2.
|
|
Mary Oliver’s twelfth book of poetry, Red Bird comprises sixty-one poems, the most ever in a single volume of her work. Overflowing with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog Percy, Red Bird is a quintessential collection of Oliver’s finest lyrics.
...
|
|
3.
|
|
With consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author, has fashioned 15 luminous prose pieces, ten never before published, which should be of singular interest to lovers of nature, students of writing, and the many admirers of her work....
|
|
4.
|
|
Now in paperback: From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the best-selling book-length poem selected for the Best American Poetry annual in both 1999 and 2000. With piercing clarity and craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned an unforgettable poem of questioning and discovery, about what is observable and what is not, about what passes and what persists. As the new U.S. Poet Laureate, Stanley Kunitz, has said: "Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations." The Boston Globe has called Mary Oliver "a great poet...she is amazed but not blinded." And the Miami Herald has said: "The gift of Oliver's poetry is that she communicates the beauty she finds in the world and makes it unforgettable."...
|
|
5.
|
|
Dream Work, a collection of forty-five poems, follows both chronologically and logically Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1983. The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness — so steadfast and radiant in American Primitive — continues in Dream Work. Additionally, she has turned her attention in these poems to the solitary and difficult labors of the spirit — to accepting the truth about one’s personal world, and to valuing the triumphs while transcending the failures of human relationships. ...
|
|
6.
|
|
Winner of a 1991 Christopher Award
Winner of the 1991 Boston Globe Lawrence L. Winship Book Award
This collection of poems by Mary Oliver once again invites the reader to step across the threshold of ordinary life into a world of natural and spiritual luminosity.
"Oliver's poems are thoroughly convincing—as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring."
-The New York Times Book Review...
|
|
7.
|
|
“Mary Oliver continues to tutor us in attention, gratitude, and reverence in this new collection of forty-seven poems.”—Frederick and Mary Brussat, Spirituality and Health
Praise for Owls and Other Fantasies:
“Mary Oliver is beautiful and accurate in this book of poetry and prose about birds…all rendered with the precision of a line-drawing of a single feather that puts the entire wing into perspective.” —Orion
Praise for Mary Oliver’s poetry:
“These are life enhancing and redemptive poems that coax the sublime from the subliminal.” —Sally Connolly, Poetry
“Mary Oliver’s poems are natural growths out of a loam of perception and feeling, and instinctive skill with language makes them seem effortless. Reading them is a sensual delight.” —May Swenson
“The gift of Oliver's poetry is that she communicates the beauty she finds in the world and makes it unforgettable” —Miami Herald ...
|
|
8.
|
|
Now in paperback: the national bestseller from the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet
"To read Thirst, Mary Oliver's most recent book of poems, is to feel gratitude for the simple fact of being alive." —Angela O'Donnell, America Magazine
Thirst, a collection of forty-three new poems from Pulitzer Prize–winner Mary Oliver, introduces two new directions in the poet's work. Grappling with grief at the death of her beloved partner of over forty years, she strives to experience sorrow as a path to spiritual progress, grief as part of loving and not its end. And within these pages she chronicles for the first time her discovery of faith, without abandoning the love of the physical world that has been a hallmark of her work for four decades.
"Mary Oliver moves by instinct, faith, and determination. She is among our finest poets, and still growing."
—Alicia Ostriker, The Nation
"It has always seemed, across her [many] books of poetry, . . . that Mary Oliver might leave us at any minute. Even a 1984 Pulitzer Prize couldn't pin her to the ground. She'd change quietly into a heron or a bear and fly or walk on forever."
—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"'My work is loving the world,' Oliver tells us….She has always done that work…in poems of considerable beauty. Now she rises, not above the world, but through it."
—Jay Parini, The Guardian, 10/6/2007
"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, Fall 2007
"To read Thirst is to feel gratitude for the simple fact of being alive. This is not surprising, as it is the effect [Oliver's] best work has produced in readers for the past 43 years."
—Angela O'Donnell, America magazine
"'My work is loving the world.' That first line of 'Messenger,' the first poem in Mary Oliver's new collection Thirst (Beacon Press), names what she does better than any other poet writing today. Just as Joan Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, which had a similar 'occasion,' was arguably her best work ever, so is Thirst Oliver's."
—Tim Pfaff, Bay Area Reporter, 1/11/07...
|
|
10.
|
|
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. ...
|
|
11.
|
|
With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built--meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. Drawing on poems from Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner imparts an extraordinary amount of information in a short space....
|
|
12.
|
|
From a poet who teaches us the beauty and magic of the natural world comes a reminder that this world includes “the creatures, with their / thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their / infallible sense of what their lives / are meant to be.”
In The Truro Bear and Other Adventures, Mary Oliver brings together ten new poems, thirty-five of her classic poems, and two essays, all about mammals, insects, and reptiles. The award-winning poet considers beasts of all kinds: bears, snakes, spiders, porcupines, humpback whales, hermit crabs, and, of course, her beloved and disobedient little dog, Percy, who appears and even speaks in thirteen poems, the closing section of this volume.
As Renée Loth has observed in the Boston Globe, “Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1983, is my choice for her joyous, accessible, intimate observations of the natural world . . . She teaches us the profound act of paying attention.”
...
|
|
13.
|
|
Mary Oliver has been writing poetry for nearly five decades, and in that time she has become America's foremost poetic voice on our experience of the physical world. This collection presents forty-two new poems, all written within the last two years, wach exhibiting the power and grace that have ceome the hallmarks of Oliver's work.
This volume includes poems on crickets, toads, trout lillies, bears; on greeting the morning, watching deer, and, finally, on lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet at the height of her power, considering the everyday in our lives and finding reasons to marvel at all around her....
|
|
14.
|
|
Mary Oliver has been writing poetry for nearly five decades, and in that time she has become America’s foremost poetic voice on our experience of the physical world. This collection presents forty-two new poems—an entire volume in itself—along with works chosen by Oliver from six of the books she has published since New and Selected Poems, Volume One.
“Oliver’s poetry is of the Earth, and about the Earth, and as these poems give voice to the planet, they render human life more beautiful, more sentient, more meaningful.” —Karen McCarthy, ForeWord
Mary Oliver, the winner of numerous prizes, is one of the most celebrated and best-selling poets in America. Her works include New and Selected Poems, Volume One (Beacon / 6877-9 / $16.00 pb) and At Blackwater Pond (Beacon / 0700-6 / $19.95 audio). She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
A P R I L ...
|
|
15.
|
|
In her first collection since the National Book Award-winning New and Selected Poems, Oliver writes of the silky bonds between every person and the natural world, of the delight of writing, of the value of silence. "Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations."--Stanley Kunitz....
|
|
16.
|
|
The New York Times has called Oliver's poems "thoroughly convincing - as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring." In this stunning collection of forty poems she writes of nature and love, of the way they transform over time. And the way they remain constant. To quote Library Journal: "From the chaos of the world, her poems distill what it means to be human and what is worthwhile about life."...
|
|
17.
|
|
Mary Oliver has been writing poetry for nearly five decades, and in that time she has become America’s foremost poetic voice on our experience of the physical world. This collection presents thirty-two new poems—an entire volume in itself—along with works chosen by Oliver from six of the books she has published since New and Selected Poems, Volume One.
This graceful volume, designed to be paired with New and Selected Poems, Volume One, includes new poems on birds, toads, flowers, insects, bodies of water, and the extraordinary experience of the everyday in our lives. In the words of Alicia Ostriker, “Mary Oliver moves by instinct, faith, and determination. She is among our finest poets, and still growing.” In both the older and new poems, Mary Oliver is a poet at the height of her control of image and language.
“Oliver’s often quiet persona almost always rides a storm of discovery . . . She continues to earn applause and admiration for continuing to provide redemptive mediation and supple praises for nature in a time when so much is under threat.” —R. T. Smith, Shenandoah ...
|
|
18.
|
|
Strikingly redesigned to accompany the publication of New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
Praise for the poetry of Mary Oliver:
"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
"Mary Oliver"s poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations."
—Stanley Kunitz
"One would have to reach back perhaps to [John] Clare or [Christopher] Smart to safely cite a parallel to Oliver"s lyricism or radical purification and her unappeasable mania for signs and wonders."
—David Barber, Poetry
"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...
|
|
19.
|
|
"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance," wrote Alexander Pope. "The dance," in the case of Oliver's brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet's ear and a poet's grace of expression, Oliver shows what makes a metrical poem work - and enables readers, as only she can, to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure that intensify both the poem's narrative and its ideas."...
|
|
20.
|
|
In Blue Iris, Mary Oliver collects ten new poems, two dozen of her poems written over the last two decades, and two previously unpublished essays on the beauty and wonder of plants. The poet considers roses, of course, as well as poppies and peonies; lilies and morning glories; the thick-bodied black oak and the fragrant white pine; the tall sunflower and the slender bean.
“Blue Iris fortuitously offers an extended sequence and new contexts for a writer whose precise eye and instinct for surprising images have made her one of the best practitioners of the lyrical revelation . . . Oliver continues to earn applause and admiration for continuing to provide redemptive meditation and supple praises for nature in a time when so much is under threat.” —R.T. Smith, Shenandoah
“Salvation, in Mary Oliver’s poems, consists of the living of a natural life, the dying of a natural death, and the ability to look clearly in both directions while keeping the two processes in balance.” —Jay Rogoff, Southern Review
“Mary Oliver’s poems are natural growths out of a loam of perception and feeling, and instinctive skill with language makes them seem effortless. Reading them is a sensual delight.” —May Swenson
“The gift of Oliver’s poetry is that she communicates the beauty she finds in the world and makes it unforgettable.” —Miami Herald
Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award, is one of the most celebrated and best-selling poets in America. Her books include New and Selected Poems, Volume One and New and Selected Poems, Volume Two; Why I Wake Early; Owls and Other Fantasies; House of Light; Dream Work; White Pine; West Wind; The Leaf and the Cloud; and What Do We Know. She has also published five books of prose, including Blue Pastures, Rules for the Dance, and Winter Hours, and an audio, At Blackwater Pond. She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
...
|
|
21.
|
|
Strikingly redesigned to accompany the publication of New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
Praise for the poetry of Mary Oliver:
"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
"Mary Oliver"s poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations."
—Stanley Kunitz
"One would have to reach back perhaps to [John] Clare or [Christopher] Smart to safely cite a parallel to Oliver"s lyricism or radical purification and her unappeasable mania for signs and wonders."
—David Barber, Poetry
"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...
|
|
22.
|
|
“Red bird came all winter / firing up the landscape / as nothing else could.” So begins Mary Oliver’s twelfth book of poetry, and the image of that fiery bird stays with the reader, appearing in unexpected forms and guises until, in a postscript, he explains himself: “For truly the body needs / a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work, / the soul has need of a body, / and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable / beauty of heaven / where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes, / and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart.”
This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Oliver’s work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet’s work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems—a dazzling achievement. As in all of Mary Oliver’s work, the pages overflow with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here, too, the poet’s attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power. Red Bird is unquestionably Mary Oliver’s most wide-ranging volume to date.
“Mary Oliver has done it again. She has assembled a collection of poems that is moving, intense and evocative in its engagement of the natural world. Yet this latest book by the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winner is distinctive among her 17 volumes for the dark undercurrent that runs through the poems . . . the hard lesson that this earth is fallen and fragile, now more than ever, and unless we learn to cherish the world, we will destroy it . . . The song Mary Oliver sings in Red Bird is the song she has always sung, but now more urgent, more needful, more true.” —Angela O’Donnell, America magazine, April 28, 2008
“Last April, Book Sense’s poetry bestseller list included two titles by Billy Collins. This year the Top 5 can be summed up in six words: Mary Oliver, Mary Oliver, Mary Oliver. Oliver’s impressive feat reflects both an enduring popularity and an unparalleled ability to touch readers on a deep, almost primal level.” —Elizabeth Lund, The Christian Science Monitor, April 15, 2008
“Mary Oliver celebrates the creatures she observes on Cape Cod in “Red Bird” (Beacon), her 17th book of poetry. A longtime resident of Provincetown, Oliver, at 72, is among the nation’s most popular poets . . . Oliver’s grief ripples through the book, as does an unwavering sense of gratitude for the moment, the memories, and her trusty dog, Percy.” —Jan Gardner, Boston Globe, April 13, 2008
“Mary Oliver is 70 years old and still ‘in love with life’ and ‘still full of beans’ as she notes in ‘Self-Portrait.’ She savors the ocean, visits a graveyard, salutes a red bird in winter, heeds the invitation of a group of goldfinches to attend their performance, and finds lessons in teachings of an owl and a mockingbird. We depend on this poet for her hallowings in the animal kingdoms. We look to her for a reverence that lifts up and celebrates the little things in nature.” —Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality & Practice, April 9, 2008
“In Red Bird, Oliver maintains the lyrical connection to the natural world that has made her work so popular. But in the new book she speaks even more loudly than usual against mankind’s growing list of abuses of the planet, while celebrating such seemingly ordinary creatures as crows.” —Poets & Writers, March/April 2008
“One of few avidly read living poets, Oliver revels in the beauty of the living world, and takes to heart its lessons in patience and pleasure, cessation and renewal. As piercingly observant as ever in this substantial and forthright collection, Oliver is rhapsodic.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist, March 1, 2008
"Mary Oliver, who won the Pultizer Prize in poetry, is my choice for her joyous, accessible, intimate observations of the natural worrld . . . She teaches us the profound act of paying attention—a living wonder that makes it possible to appreciate all the others." —Renee Loth, Boston Globe
"It has always seemed . . . that Mary Oliver might leave us any minute. Even a 1984 Pulitzer Prize couldn't pin her to the ground. She'd change quietly into a heron or a bear and fly or walk off forever." —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"'My work is loving the world,' Oliver tells us . . . She has always done that work . . . in poems of considerable beauty. Now she rises, not above the world, but through it." —Jay Parini, The Guardian ...
|
|
24.
|
|
Edited by award-winning poet and essayist Mary Oliver, the latest edition of this "rich and thoughtful collection" (Publishers Weekly) offers the finest essays "judiciously selected from countless publications" (Chicago Tribune). ...
|
|
