Mary Oliver
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winning Poet
Red Bird (UK Edition)
‘Red bird came all winter / firing up the landscape / as nothing else could.’ So begins her latest collection, 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.’
Red Bird is Mary Oliver’s most wide-ranging collection to date, and includes her first-ever cycle of love poems. As in all her books, there are poems on the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, as well as tributes to the many people she has loved in her seventy years, and poems for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here her attention turns also with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the downtrodden by the powerful.
From Maria Shriver’s Blip.TV channel: a video of Mary reading “Mornings at Blackwater.”
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