Mary Oliver

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

Whatever a house is to the heart and body of man—refuge, comfort, luxury—surely it is as much or more to the spirit.

I don't think I am old yet, or done with growing. But my perspective has altered—I am less hungry for the busyness of the body, more interested in the tricks of the mind. I am gaining, also, a new affection for wood that is useless, that has been tossed out, that merely exists, quietly, wherever it has ended up. Planks on the beach rippled and salt-soaked. Pieces of piling, full of the tunnels of shipworm. In the woods, fallen branches of oak, of maple, of the dear, wind-worn pines. They lie on the ground and do nothing. They are travelers on the way to oblivion.

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, her most personal book yet "What good company Mary Oliver is!" the Los Angeles Times has remarked. And never more so than in this extraordinary and engaging gathering of nine essays, accompanied by a brief selection of new prose poems and poems. (One of the essays has been chosen as among the best of the year by THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 1998, another by The Anchor Essay Annual.) With the grace and precision that have won her legions of admirers, Oliver talks here of turtle eggs and housebuilding, of her surprise at an unexpected whistling she hears, of the "thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else." She talks of her own poems and of some of her favorite poets: Poe, writing of "our inescapable destiny," Frost and his ability to convey at once that "everything is all right, and everything is not all right," the "unmistakably joyful" Hopkins, and Whitman, seeking through his poetry "the replication of a miracle." And Oliver offers us a glimpse as well of her "private and natural self—something that must in the future be taken into consideration by any who would claim to know me."

Patty M.

This book served as my introduction to Mary Oliver, and what a wonderful introduction it was. I’m looking forward to reading more of her work!

“In order to be the person I want to be, I must strive, hourly, against the drag of the others.”

Tara King

This totally obscure Mary Oliver book was listed for $2 on Kindle and I said, Sure! Why not? because I've been looking for a copy of American Primitive at every single independent book store I go to and zero of them have a copy.

Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too.

So I read this instead, and it was good. A collection of short essays, poems, prose poems--it all hangs together by the singularity of her vision and her voice.  She writes about building a house with her own hands with the same reverence she uses for the hawk hanging above the trees.  

The four essays on poets (Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Frost, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman) were everything I hoped for from We Begin in Gladness.  A poet's reading of the poems, of how they became who they were--without the cloying hero worship, the academic orderliness of the other book.  I felt -- ah! This is who they were, and we can appreciate their strangeness and their gift without feeling terrible about ourselves. It's not a hierarchy, but a rich landscape. And no surprise that she would write poets that way--is the wolf *better* than the lark, or just bigger? 

Let me always be who I am, and then some.

Winter Hours Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

Reviews

Highlights