Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, is one of the most celebrated and best-selling poets in America. Her books include 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, as well as four books of prose, including Blue Pastures, Rules for the Dance, and Winter Hours. She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.From the Hardcover edition.
It has always seemed, across her 15 books of poetry, five of prose and several essays and chapbooks, 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 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 These are life-enhancing and redemptive poems that coax the sublime from the subliminal. --Sally Connolly, Poetry Mary's Oliver 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 Oliver's poems are thoroughly convincing--as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring. --New York Times Book Review