New and Selected Poems, Volume One

When New and Selected Poems, Volume One was originally published in 1992, Mary Oliver was awarded the National Book Award. In the fourteen 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 only 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. In "The Summer Day," she asks, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" "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.

Mary Oliver

New Poems (1991–1992) Rain Spring Azures When Death Comes Picking Blueberries, Austerlitz, New York, 1957 Her Grave Goldenrod The Waterfall Peonies This Morning Again It Was in the Dusty Pines Marengo Field Near Linden, Alabama Gannets Whelks Alligator Poem Hawk Goldfi nches Rice Poppies A Certain Sharpness in the Morning Air A Bitterness Morning Water Snake The Egret The Snowshoe Hare The Sun Winter Lonely, White Fields Hummingbird Pauses at the Trumpet Vine White Flowers October From House of Light (1990) Some Questions You Might Ask Moccasin Flowers The Buddha’s Last Instruction Spring Singapore The Hermit Crab Lilies The Swan Indonesia Some Herons Five a.m. in the Pinewoods Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard The Kookaburras The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water Nature The Ponds The Summer Day Roses, Late Summer Maybe White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field From Dream Work (1986) Dogfish Morning Poem Rage Wild Geese Robert Schumann Starfish The Journey A Visitor Stanley Kunitz One or Two Things The Turtle Sunrise Two Kinds of Deliverance Landscape Acid The Moths 1945–1985: Poem for the Anniversary The Sunflowers From American Primitive (1983) August Mushrooms Lightning Egrets First Snow Ghosts Vultures Rain in Ohio University Hospital, Boston Skunk Cabbage Blossom White Night The Fish Crossing the Swamp Humpbacks A Meeting The Sea Happiness Tecumseh In Blackwater Woods From Twelve Moons (1979) Sleeping in the Forest Mussels The Black Snake Spring Strawberry Moon The Truro Bear Entering the Kingdom Buck Moon—From the Field Guide to Insects Dreams The Lamps Bone Poem Aunt Leaf Hunter’s Moon— Eating the Bear Last Days The Black Walnut Tree Wolf Moon The Night Traveler