Description

‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?’

One of America’s best loved poets, Mary Oliver is also among nature’s most brilliant and devoted observers, whose words ask us to live with our eyes open wider. This luminous selection brings together her best-known works from across her career.

‘Oliver’s poems are … as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring’ New York Times Book Review

‘Mary Oliver’s poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing’ Stanley Kunitz

‘Just a few seemingly simple phrases perfectly express what we need to know just then, in that moment’ Oprah Winfrey

‘It doesn’t feel like you have to take a seminar in order to understand Mary Oliver’s poetry. She’s speaking directly to you as a human being’ Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker

Publisher Review

It is no exaggeration to say that she gave me the blueprint, the road map, for the rest of my life. Mary Oliver taught me how to live. — Steven Petrow * The New York Times * Opening this book is like opening the sun. Let it warm you, thrill you, and shine a light on the dark places. Essential reading. — Joelle Taylor Oliver’s writing contains multitudes, revelling in visionary observations on the infinitesimal and the infinite regarding nature and our humble place within it. Reading her makes the difficult world we live in more bearable, even sweet. With great acuity and care, she creates poems in which rest and respite are possible for us all. As a young poet encountering Oliver’s work for the first time during my early twenties, I learnt from her devotion to language that everything – both sacred and mundane – is worthy of attention, which is to say, worthy of poetry. — Mary Jean Chan [In] so much of her poetry, just a few seemingly simple phrases perfectly express what we need to know just then, in that moment. The symmetry we feel when we are connected, at one with nature and the world. — Oprah Winfrey It doesn’t feel like you have to take a seminar in order to understand Mary Oliver’s poetry. She’s speaking directly to you as a human being. — Ruth Franklin * The New Yorker * 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 I learned from Mary Oliver how attention is a kind of love, how shining your mind’s light on a thing – a grasshopper, a bird, a tree – is a way of showing gratitude. I learned that poems do not need to be “difficult” to be intelligent, that poems can be both inspirational and investigative, that poems can be tender without being soft. I learned from her to own my wonder and to stay open to uncertainty. — Maggie Smith As an atheist, the poetry of Mary Oliver is the closest I come to prayer. — Andrew McMillan I think we do not have many poets like Oliver, who without apology affirms life everywhere she observes it. — Maxine Kumin 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 * The New York Times Book Review *