by Mary Oliver
First published 2003
Mary Oliver brings her Pulitzer Prize-winning vision to forty new poems that celebrate the natural world's endless surprises. She watches one hundred white-sided dolphins surge through summer waters. She studies bees that know every stalk and leaf in their territory. Oliver pauses to notice what others miss, finding moments of wonder in ordinary scenes. Her poems move between careful observation and sudden astonishment, between the concrete details of nature and its larger mysteries. Stanley Kunitz praised her work as "fine and deep" poetry that "reads like a blessing." These poems embrace both the fleeting moments and eternal cycles of the world around us. Oliver follows Emerson's insight that the unseen truths matter most, weaving together gratitude and searching in verses that reveal how much we can discover when we truly look.
Genres: nature, literary-fiction, poetry, 21st-century
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: poetic-voice
Period: 21st-century
88 pages · Paperback · Grand Central Publishing