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1. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career.Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years.
Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.
2. 1: New and Selected Poems, Volume One
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New and Selected Poems Volume OneDescription
Mary Oliver was awarded the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, Volume One.Since its initial appearance it has become one of the best-selling volumes of poetry in the country. This collection features thirty poems published only in this volume as well as selections from the poet's first eight books.Mary Oliver's perceptive, brilliantly crafted poems about the natural landscape and the fundamental questions of life and death have won high praise from critics and readers alike. "Do you love this world?" she interrupts a poem about peonies to ask the reader. "Do you cherish your humble and silky life?" She makes us see the extraordinary in our everyday lives, how something as common as light can be "an invitation/to happiness,/and that happiness,/when it's done right,/is a kind of holiness,/palpable and redemptive." She illuminates how a near miss with an alligator can be the catalyst for seeing the world "as if for the second time/the way it really is." Oliver's passionate demonstrations of delight are powerful reminders of the bond between every individual, all living things, and the natural world.
3. Dog Songs: Poems
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Penguin BooksDescription
The popularity of [Dog Songs] feels as inevitable and welcome as a wagging tail upon homecoming. The Boston GlobeMary Olivers Dog Songs is a celebration of the special bond between human and dog, as understood through the poets relationships to the canines that have accompanied her daily walks, warmed her home, and inspired her work. Olivers poems begin in the small everyday moments familiar to all dog lovers, but through her extraordinary vision, these observations become higher meditations on the world and our place in it.
Dog Songs includes visits with old friends, like Olivers beloved Percy, and introduces still others in poems of love and laughter, heartbreak and grief. Throughout, the many dogs of Olivers life merge as fellow travelers and as guides, uniquely able to open our eyes to the lessons of the moment and the joys of nature and connection.
4. Upstream: Selected Essays
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Upstream Selected EssaysDescription
One of O, The Oprah Magazines Ten Best Books of the Year!TheNew York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver.
In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.
So beginsUpstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood friend Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, a place to enter, and in which to feel, and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. As she writes, I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.
Upstreamfollows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.
5. Why I Wake Early: New Poems
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Used Book in Good ConditionDescription
The forty-seven new works in this volume include poems on crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears, greeting the morning, watching the deer, and, finally, lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who considers the everyday in our lives and the natural world around us and finds a multitude of reasons to wake early.6. A Thousand Mornings: Poems
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Penguin BooksDescription
The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from celebrated poet Mary OliverIn A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her lifes work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her treasured dog Percy, Oliver is open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments and explores with startling clarity, humor, and kindness the mysteries of our daily experience.
Mary Oliver's latest book, Upstream, will be published in October 2016 by Penguin Press
7. A Poetry Handbook
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Mariner BooksDescription
With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built-meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. Drawing on poems from Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, Oliver imparts an extraordinary amount of information in a remarkably short space. Stunning (Los Angeles Times). Index.
8. American Primitive