Selected Poems

'Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?' One of America's best loved poets, Mary Oliver is also among nature's most brilliant and devoted observers, whose words ask us to live with our eyes open wider. This luminous selection brings together her best-known works from across her career. 'Oliver's poems are ... as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring' New York Times Book Review
'Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing' Stanley Kunitz 'Just a few seemingly simple phrases perfectly express what we need to know just then, in that moment' Oprah Winfrey 'It doesn't feel like you have to take a seminar in order to understand Mary Oliver's poetry. She's speaking directly to you as a human being' Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker

Mary Oliver was born in rural Ohio in 1935. The author of more than fifteen collections of poetry and essays, she is one of America's best selling poets. Among her many honours, she was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive (1983) and a National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, Volume One (1992). She received the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. For four decades, she lived on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with her partner Molly Malone Cook, writing while walking outside with her notebook.