Mary Oliver
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winning Poet
New and Selected Poems, Volume One
Contains 142 classic poems, including “The Journey,” “The Summer Day” and “Wild Geese”
When New and Selected Poems, Volume One was originally published in 1992, Mary Oliver was awarded the National Book Award. In the years since its initial appearance it has become one of the best-selling volumes of poetry in the country. This collection features thirty poems published for the first time 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.
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Copyright @ 1986 by Mary Oliver. First published in Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press. Reprinted in New and Selected Poems, Volume One, Beacon Press.
