Mary Oliver

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be. So begins "Upstream," a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood friend Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, a place to enter, and in which to feel, and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. As she writes, I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. "Upstream," a radiant collection of essays with a new piece on Provincetown, follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us."

Selected Essays

Upstream

"Throughout her ... career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her ... verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things ... She now returns with a ... definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years"--

The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

Devotions

Presents a collection of poems that explore such themes as the wonder of nature, the power of attention, and the mysteries of the daily experience.

A Thousand Mornings

A collection of poems explores the mysterious landscape of the human heart, describing the meaning and wonder of loving another person.

Felicity

Presents a collection of poems that reflects the author's signature imagery-based language and her observations of the unaffected beauty of nature.

Poems

Blue Horses

A selection of new and favorite poems by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Primitive celebrates the canine companions who have enriched her world, exploring how they have accompanied her walks, inspired her work and served as life guides.

Thirty-five Dog Songs and One Essay

Dog Songs

Offers advice on reading and writing poetry, and discusses imitation, sound, the line, poem forms, free verse, diction, imagery, revision, and workshops

A Poetry Handbook

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

New and Selected Poems

"Mary Oliver continues to tutor us in attention, gratitude, and reverence in this new collection of 47 poems."--Frederick and Mary Ann Brussat, authors of "Spirituality Legacy."

New Poems

Why I Wake Early

Thirst, a collection of forty-three new poems from the 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. In three stunning long poems, Oliver explores the dimensions and tests the parameters of religious doctrine, asking of being good, for example, "To what purpose? / Hope of Heaven? Not that. But to enter / the other kingdom: grace, and imagination, / and the multiple sympathies: to be as a leaf, a rose,/ a dolphin."

Thirst

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. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? —Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day" (one of the poems in this volume) Winner of a 1991 Christopher Award Winner of the 1991 Boston Globe Lawrence L. Winship Book Award

House of Light

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.

Poems and Essays

Blue Iris

From one of America’s leading poets, a breath-taking collection of new poems “Joy is not made to be a crumb,” writes Mary Oliver, and certainly it abounds in her most recent book of poetry and prose poems. Her twentieth volume, Swan shows us that, though we may be “made out of the dust of stars,” we are of the world she captures here so vividly: the acorn that hides within it an entire tree, the wings of the swan like the stretching light of the river, the frogs singing in the muddy shallows. As the Los Angeles Times noted recently, so many readers “go to her for solace, regeneration and inspiration” that it is not surprising Vice President Joe Biden chose to read one of her poems during the 9/11 remembrance at Ground Zero last September. Few poets express the immense complexities of human experience as skillfully as Mary Oliver, or capture so memorably the smallest nuances, speaking, for example, of stones, “the little ones you can / hold in your hands, their heartbeats / so secret, so hidden it may take years / before, finally, you hear them.” No wonder Oliver ranks, according to the Weekly Standard, “among the finest poets the English language has ever produced.”

Poems and Prose Poems

Swan

A collection of poems celebrates the many forms that love can take and bemoans the fate of the natural world.

Red Bird

A winner of both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize presents a lyrical, intensely personal collection of essays and poetry that covers such topics as turtle eggs, her favorite poets, housebuilding, the flight of swans, and her own remarkable literary endeavors. 15,000 first printing.

Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

Winter Hours

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Her most acclaimed volume of poetry, American Primitive contains fifty visionary poems about nature, the humanity in love, and the wilderness of America, both within our bodies and outside. "American Primitive enchants me with the purity of its lyric voice, the loving freshness of its perceptions, and the singular glow of a spiritual life brightening the pages." -- Stanley Kunitz "These 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

American Primitive

A collection of poetry and essays celebrates the birds that have played an important role in the author's life, including the owl, goldfinch, swan, hummingbird, and loon.

Owls and Other Fantasies

Poets must read and study, but also they must learn to tilt and whisper, shout, or dance, each in his or her own way, or we might just as well copy the old books. But, no, that would never do, for always the new self swimming around in the old world feels itself uniquely verbal. And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. 'Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?' This book is my comment.--from the Foreword.

Essays and Other Writings

Long Life

A collection of forty poems that explore the transformation of love and nature over time

West Wind

"Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing," wrote Stanley Kunitz many years ago; and recently, Rita Dove described her last volume, The Leaf and the Cloud, as "a brilliant meditation." For the many admirers of Mary Oliver's dazzling poetry and luminous vision, as well as for those who may be coming to her work for the first time, What Do We Know will be a revelation. These forty poems-of observing, of searching, of pausing, of astonishment, of giving thanks-embrace in every sense the natural world, its unrepeatable moments and its ceaseless cycles. Mary Oliver evokes unforgettable images-from one hundred white-sided dolphins on a summer day to bees that have memorized every stalk and leaf in a field-even as she reminds us, after Emerson, that "the invisible and imponderable is the sole fact."

Mary Oliver

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