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Red Bird

“Red bird came all winter / firing up the landscape / as nothing else could.” So begins Mary Oliver’s twelfth book of poetry, and the image of that fiery bird stays with the reader, appearing in unexpected forms and guises until, in a postscript, he explains himself: “For truly the body needs / a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work, / the soul has need of a body, / and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable / beauty of heaven / where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes, / and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart.”

This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Oliver’s work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet’s work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems—a dazzling achievement. As in all of Mary Oliver’s work, the pages overflow with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here, too, the poet’s attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power. Red Bird is unquestionably Mary Oliver’s most wide-ranging volume to date.

From Maria Shriver’s Blip.TV channel: a video of Mary reading “Mornings at Blackwater.”

Table of Contents

Red Bird
Luke
Maker of All Things, Even Healings
There Is a Place Beyond Ambition
Self-Portrait
Night and the River
Boundaries
Straight Talk from Fox
Another Everyday Poem
Visiting the Graveyard
Ocean
With the Blackest of Inks
Invitation
The Orchard
A River Far Away and Long Ago
Night Herons
Summer Story
The Teachers
Percy and Books (Eight)
Summer Morning
Small Bodies
Winter and the Nuthatch
Crow Says
Sometimes
Percy (Nine)
Black Swallowtail
Red
Showing the Birds
From This River, When I Was a Child, I Used to Drink
Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears Trying to Survive on the Melting Ice Floes
Of The Empire
Not This, Not That
Iraq
In the Pasture
Both Worlds
We Should Be Well Prepared
Desire
I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life (Ten)
Swimming, One Day in August
Mornings at Blackwater
Who Said This?
This Day, and Probably Tomorrow Also
Of Goodness
Meadowlark Sings and I Greet Him in Return
When I Cried for Help
In the Evening, in the Pinewoods
Love Sorrow
Of Love
Eleven Versions of the Same Poem:

Am I lost?
I don’t want to live a small life
I am the one
Now comes the long blue cold
So every day
If the philosopher is right
There you were, and it was like spring
Where are you?
I wish I loved no one
I will try
What is the greatest gift?

Someday
Red Bird Explains Himself