Product Details

• • Hardcover: 192 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Press (October 11, 2016)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1594206708
  • ISBN-13: 978-1594206702
  • Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.6 x 8.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces

Review Highly recommended as an entr©e to Oliver™s works, this volume shouldalso be required reading for artists of all kinds, not just writers, andespecially aspiring creative minds.,?? Library Journal (starredreview)Distinguished, honored, prolific, popular, bestselling”adjectives thatdon™t always hang out together”describe Oliver™s body of work, nearly threedozen volumes of poetry and collections of prose. This group (19 essays, 16from previous collections) is a distillation of sorts. Born of twoblessings”the natural world, and the world of writing: literature,, itpartakes of the spirits of a journal, a commonplace book, and a meditation.The natural world pictured here is richly various, though Oliver seems mostdrawn to waterways. All manner of aquatic life”shark and mackerel, duck andegret”accompany her days, along with spiders, foxes, even a bear. Her keenobservations come as narrative (following a fox) or as manual (building ahouse) or as poems masquerading as description (I have seen bluefish arc andsled across the water, an acre of them, leaping and sliding back under thewater, then leaping again, toothy, terrible, lashed by hunger,). When theworld of writing enters, currently unfashionable 19th-century writersemerge”Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, William James”in readings that evadeacademic textual analyses and share the look-at-what-I-saw tone animatingOliver™s observations of the natural world. The message of her book for itsreaders is a simple and profound one: open your eyes.,??Publishers WeeklyPartpaean to nature and part meditation on the writing life, this elegant andsimply written book is a neo-Romantic celebration of life and the pursuit ofart that is sure to enchant Oliver’s many admirers. A lyrical, tender essaycollection.,?? Kirkus Read more About the Author Born in a small town in Ohio,Mary Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of twenty-eight. Over the course of her long career, she has received numerous awards.Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in1984. She has led workshops and held residencies at various colleges anduniversities, including Bennington College, where she held the CatharineOsgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching. Oliver currently lives inFlorida. Read more