Mary Oliver
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winning Poet
What Do We Know
$16.00 Paperback
Browse this book
Available from:
Amazon
Barnes
and Noble
Independent
Bookstore
How to Buy
“Mary Oliver’s poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing,” wrote Stanley Kunitz many years ago; and recently, Rita Dove described her last volume, The Leaf and the Cloud, as “a brilliant meditation.” For the many admirers of Mary Oliver’s dazzling poetry and luminous vision, as well as for those who may be coming to her work for the first time, What Do We Know will be a revelation. These forty poems—of observing, of searching, of pausing, of astonishment, of giving thanks—embrace in every sense the natural world, its unrepeatable moments and its ceaseless cycles. Mary Oliver evokes unforgettable images—from one hundred white-sided dolphins on a summer day to bees that have memorized every stalk and leaf in a field—even as she reminds us, after Emerson, that “the invisible and imponderable is the sole fact.”
Praise
“In a region that has produced most of the nation’s poet laureates, it is risky to single out one fragile 71-year-old bard of Provincetown. But Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1983, is my choice for her joyous, accessible, intimate observations of the natural world. Her “Wild Geese” has become so popular it now graces posters in dorm rooms across the land. But don’t hold that against her. Read almost anything in New and Selected Poems. She teaches us the profound act of paying attention—a living wonder that makes it possible to appreciate all the others.”
—Renée Loth, Boston Globe