Mary Oliver
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winning Poet
Evidence: Poems
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Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” Evidence is a collection of forty-seven new poems on all of Mary Oliver’s classic themes. She writes perceptively about grief and mortality, love and nature, and the spiritual sustenance she draws from their gifts. Ever grateful for the bounty that is offered to us daily by the natural world, Oliver is attentive to the mysteries it imparts. The arresting beauty she finds in rivers and stones, willows and field corn, the mockingbird’s “embellishments” or the last hours of darkness permeates her poems. Her newest volume is imbued through and through with that power of nature to, in Oliver’s words, “excite the viewers toward sublime thought.”
Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Oliver is a skilled guide to the rarest and most exquisite insights of the natural world. “After a few hours in her quiet, exuberant presence,” writes Los Angeles Times columnist Susan Salter Reynolds, “one feels as though the raw sunlight in the room, the brightness of the water, the white wood and flashing wings outside the window are bleaching unimportant details from the day.” From one of America’s most loved and respected poets, this new volume plumbs the evidence of our most profound mysteries.
Table of Contents
Yellow
Swans
Heart Poem
Prince Buzzard
Li Po and the Moon
Thinking of Swirler
Snowy Egret
Violets
Then Bluebird Sang
We Shake with Joy
Spring
The Poet Always Carries a Notebook
More Honey Locust
Halleluiah
It Was Early
Water
If You Say It Right, It Helps the Heart to Bear It
Empty Branch in the Orchard
A Lesson from James Wright
Deep Summer
Almost a Conversation
There Are a Lot of Mockingbirds in This Book
Prayer
At the Pond
To Begin With, the Sweet Grass
With Thanks to the Field Sparrow, Whose Voice Is So Delicate and Humble
Landscape in Winter
I Want to Write Something So Simply
Evidence
I Am Standing
Schubert
Moon and Water
When I Was Young and Poor
At the River Clarion
Philip’s Birthday
I Want
About Angels and About Trees
Meeting Wolf
Just Rain
Mysteries, Yes
Imagine
First Days in San Miguel de Allende
The Trees
Broken, Unbroken
The Singular and Cheerful Life
Another Summer Begins
Praise
“One of the astonishing aspects of Oliver’s work is the consistency of tone over this long period [of her career]. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets . . . There is no complaint in Ms. Oliver’s poetry, no whining, but neither is there the sense that life is in any way easy . . . These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward.”
—Stephen Dobyns, New York Times Book Review