A Thousand Mornings [Hardcover]

Mary Oliver (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 11, 2012

Mornings with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver

 

In A THOUSAND MORNINGS, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life’s work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. In these pages, Oliver shares the wonder of dawn, the grace of animals, and the transformative power of attention. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her adored dog, Percy, she is ever patient in her observations and open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments.

 

Our most precious chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver opens our eyes to the nature within, to its wild and its quiet. With startling clarity, humor, and kindness, A THOUSAND MORNINGS explores the mysteries of our daily experience.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Beginning with her first poetry book in 1963, Oliver has chronicled her enthrallment to the living world, especially the land and sea surrounding Provincetown, Massachusetts, and her spiritual evolution. In her newest collection, her compact poems are conversational and teasing, yet their taproots reach deeply into the aquifers of religion, philosophy, and literature. Some read like brief fables, such as when an old fox compares their respective species and tells the poet, “You fuss, we live.” A Bob Dylan quote inspires a poem about song, while a mockingbird’s mimicry elicits thoughts about authenticity and one’s true self. The crucial and moving poem “Hum, Hum” describes a scarring childhood redeemed by the solace of the embracing, living world and the words of poets. Oliver is funny and renegade as she protests cultural vapidity, greed, violence, and environmental decimation and ravishing in her close readings of nature, such as the resplendent “Tides,” which surges like the sea. Ultimately, Oliver warns us that “the only ship there is / is the ship we are all on / burning the world as we go.” --Donna Seaman

About the Author

Born in a small town in Ohio, MARY OLIVER published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of twenty-eight. Over the course of her long career, she has received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She has led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Bennington College, where she held the Catherine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching. Oliver currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; 1 edition (October 11, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594204772
• ISBN-13: 978-1594204777
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,016 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #6 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > American

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 69 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Humble, inquisitive, creative, mystical Mary Oliver October 13, 2012

By Thomas E. Defreitas

Format:Hardcover

There is one complaint to be made about A Thousand Mornings: it is far too short -- 80 pages, and many of those pages are blank. However, when the pages are not blank, we are drawn into the world of Mary Oliver, and it is a world from which we do not eagerly depart!

The book opens with the wry humor of "I Go Down to the Shore," and moves from there to the Roethkean questionings of "I Happened to Be Standing": "But I thought, of the wren's singing, what could this be if it isn't a prayer?" There are several one-paragraph prose poems of "earth-praise," which will entice those readers who are willing to be enticed. There is a dialogue with a fox, resumed from earlier books, and a nod to Bob Dylan, expanding on one of the book's epigraphs, Dylan's words: "Anything worth thinking about is also worth singing about." Oliver speaks of growth in the midst of devastation in the poem "Hurricane"; and this reader smiled at "Three Things to Remember," even if the poem was too baldly "proverbial."

The change of the seasons, summer to autumn, is depicted in "Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness," although to be sure, there is metaphoric darkness:

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

The title poem, "A Thousand Mornings," is a prose-poem of a single sentence, but we do not indict the poem for brevity, when it speaks of "mak[ing] its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing......"

Centrally placed, and perhaps the central achievement of the book, is the sequence "Hum, Hum" -- ostensibly about a swarm of bees, but probing into the personal life of the narrator:

That child was myself, that kept running away
to the also running creek,
to colt's foot and trilliams,
to the effortless prattle of the birds.

Section 4 of the poem, a section which bears the title "Of the Father" contains the narrator's revelation of a deep trauma suffered in childhood, a trauma which Oliver describes tersely, undramatically, and devastatingly.

The lovely litany in section 6 of "Hum, Hum" would be a compendium of the anodynes to pains suffered by the poet, and also an antidote to any readerly "disappointment."

Thomas Merton, we feel, would applaud Oliver's prose-poem "I Have Decided": a brief apologia for the contemplative life. There are poems about William Blake, black snakes, and "the way of the world" -- a carnivorous and (if I may) piscivorous world. There is a poem against "Extending the Airport Runway" and a poem of dismay at the news presented by "The Morning Paper": some readers, even those favorably disposed to Oliver, might fairly describe these protests as routine.

But there are apt rewards for the reader willing to find them, from "the thrush singing in the glowing woods" to the sea which "can rise, ebb, froth, like an incoming frenzy of fountains."

As noted in the beginning of this review, we might have cause to complain of brevity -- the apothegmatic brevity of some of the poems, or of the modest size of the book as a whole -- but such complaints are out of court when we enter the world of humble, inquisitive, creative Mary Oliver: the spiritual heiress to the great poet-mystics Whitman, Blake, and Roethke -- Mary Oliver, a poet who resembles no one as much as she resembles herself. I recommend this book highly. Read more ›

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Once Again with Wonder October 16, 2012

By Yours Truly VINE™ VOICE

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I greet any new volume from Mary Oliver eagerly, and this one is particularly fine. It seems tinged with a certain autumnal somberness. For the uninitiated, Oliver writes primarily about the natural world around her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. (I'm taking "Lines Written in Days of Growing Darkness" to a solstice celebration.) But there are also poems here about her family, about the news and travel and about the demise of her endearing dog, Percy.

This is the first time I've downloaded poetry to my Kindle, and I am eager to see if I read it more often this way.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Lovely words! Lovely sentiments! October 12, 2012

By C. Conley

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am always impressed with the word choices and deep reflections of Mary Oliver.
This book is no exception. I just spent a lovely afternoon savoring this book and I'm buying more copies for friends.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Mary Oliver fans will love it, but it is a bit thin November 18, 2012

By Isadore Ann VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I enjoyed this book, but I do relate to the reviews who also said there was a lot of blank pages and white space. There isn't the stand out poems that have been present in some of her earlier books, and this book probably wouldn't have been printed if she were any other writer. It's a bit thin on content and even on those concrete images that have been present in some of her earlier books. Still, this one will make a nice addition for the fan of poetry or of Oliver.

I gave this three stars because, while I'm a huge fan of Oliver's and did enjoy it, I didn't LOVE it. Does that mean it's a bad book? Not at all. In fact, if you're an Oliver fan, you're happy that she's still putting out books in her iconic style.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Beautiful Collection November 11, 2012

By oldbug

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This collection of poetry, is, as usual, wonderfully insightful and sensitive. She is always in touch with nature, with herself, and with the "spiritual." These poems seem to reflect her movement into an older phase of her life. She remains reverent, curious, and in awe of life in all of its forms.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Bravo! November 2, 2012

By Siggen

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Reading Mary Oliver is like entering an enchanted garden, a garden which is in fact our own everyday world, too easily overlooked in the humdrum of the ordinary. Oliver makes us see the beauty of it all!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Morning Paper December 13, 2012

By Patricia Kramer

Format:Hardcover

I loved the nature poems in this volume, and the two about Oliver's dog, but the one I want to highlight stood out and uniquely spoke to me and it is about neither of those.

The Morning Paper

Read one newspaper daily (the morning edition
is the best
for by evening you know that you at least
have lived through another day)
and let the disasters, the unbelievable
yet approved decisions,
soak in.

I don't need to name the countries,
ours among them.

What keeps us from falling down, our faces
to the ground;ashamed, ashamed?

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry for the Heart December 1, 2012

By Vera M. Hummel

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

So many of the words, phrases, and ideas in this book of Mary Oliver touched me deeply. I couldn't stop reading until I had enjoyed every poem. Then I began to reread more slowly, savoring the images, the moods, and the meanings.

While I have generally appreciated Oliver's poetry, this book is truly a treasure, one I will return to over and over again.