Description

From the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver, a collection of evocative and haunting poetry and prose

“Oliver’s poems are...as genuine, moving and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring.” —New York Times

In her first collection since winning the National Book Award, Mary Oliver writes of the silky bonds between every person and the natural world, of the delight of writing, of the value of silence.

The collection features the fourteen-part poem “In the Blackwater Woods,” as well as “At the Lake” and the prose poem “Snail.”

About the Author

Mary Oliver (1935–2019), one of the most popular and widely honored poets in the U.S., was the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, she received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for American Primitive in 1984. Oliver also received the Shelley Memorial Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award; the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light; the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems; a Lannan Foundation Literary Award; and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence. She lived most of her life in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Praise For…

"Oliver is a cool and modest presence in the world her poems summon. Sometimes, she is a festively whimsical one. But neither her modesty nor her shows of whimsy are more interesting than the deft, clear, unpredictable path she traces between them." — Publishers Weekly

"Oliver's poems are thoroughly convincing – as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring." — New York Times

"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