From Amazon.com
In lines pulled taut by the tension between the silent beauty of nature and the poet's longing for words, Mary Oliver has again provided readers with plenty to think about. Consider "Stars": "How can I hope to be friends / with the hard white stars / whose flaring and hissing are not speech / but a pure radiance? / How can I hope to be friends / with the yawning spaces between them / where nothing, ever, is spoken?" Yet Oliver does strike up a kind of friendship between nature's inexpressible beauty and the necessity and solace of language. She writes vividly of each, noting the way "the sunlight and shadows are chasing each other," (from "The Dog Has Run Off Again"), in one instance, while elsewhere describing the excitement of writing poems: "little curls little shafts / of letters words / little flames leaping" (from "Forty Years"). Oliver is one of the most honored poets now writing in the English language, and, along with Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and A.R. Ammons, an important part of the revival we are seeing in contemporary pastoral poetry.
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From Library Journal
Although her papers may scatter as the west wind sweeps through her room, Oliver's house is in order. From the chaos of the world, her poems distill what it means to be human and what is worthwhile about life. Echoing the Romantics and Whitman, she affirms the value of aloneness with nature, of watching and listening?not just to get it down as art but simply to live it: "And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists/ of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,/ I don't even want to come in out of the rain." While practically every poem in this collection is about death, joy and death are inseparable: "If there is life after the earth-life, will you come with me?" The prose-poem referred to in the title?a 13-part series addressed to a lover?sums up a humble life lived to the fullest in a cricket's imagined musings: "It thought: 'here I am still, in my black suit, warm and content'?and drew a little music from its dark thighs." For all collections.?Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
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--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
