The Leaf And The Cloud: A Poem [Paperback]

Mary Oliver (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 2001

With piercing clarity and craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned an unforgettable poem of questioning and discovery, about what is observable and what is not, about what passes and what persists. As the U.S. Poet Laureate, Stanley Kunitz, has said: "Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations." The Boston Globe has called Mary Oliver "a great poet . . . she is amazed but not blinded." And the Miami Herald has said: "The gift of Oliver's poetry is that she communicates the beauty she finds in the world and makes it unforgettable."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Oliver's seven-part book-length poem takes its title from Ruskin: "Between the earth and man arose the leaf. Between the heaven and man came the cloud." Oliver's speaker meditates on her own mortality, feels her body "rising through the water/ not much more than a leaf," and declares that she "believes in God,/ though she has no word for it." Wandering wide-eyed through poem, book and world, she can seem too obviously faux na?ve, more stentorian than Marianne Moore-like: "my mother, alas, alas,/ did not always love her life,/ heavier than iron it was/ as she carried it in her arms/ from room to room,/ oh, unforgettable!" Indeed, many of the interrogatives here seem to come right out of a children's book ("Did you know that the ant has a tongue/ with which to gather in all that it can/ of sweetness?// Did you know that?") as do the apostrophes: "and will you find yourself finally wanting to forget/ all enclosures, including// the enclosure of yourself, o lonely leaf." Oliver at her best is less self-consciously playful, whether considering "the mosquito's/ dark dart,/ flushing and groaning" or "the big owl, shaking herself/ out of the pitchpines." But preciousness mars the volume in section after section, undermining fresh utterancesA"I will sing for the Jains and their careful brooms./ I will sing for the salt and the pepper in their little towers on the clean table"Awith a cartoonlike silliness: "I will sing for the two coyotes who came at me with their strong teeth/ and then, at the last moment, began to smile," or worse, with banal abstractions: "I will sing for what is in front of the veil, the floating light./ I will sing for what is behind the veil-light, light, and more light." While the speaker begins many of the lines in humility, she inevitably gets caught up in the wonder and frenzy of her own creations, making this book seem more like an ecstatic one-off than a substantial new collection from a Pulitzer Prize winner. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

An exquisite book-length poem by a poet devoted to close scrutiny of the natural world and exact, sensuous, and ecstatic description. Lyrical and philosophical in the American transcendental tradition, Oliver addresses her readers directly to ravishing effect, and there is magic and wisdom in her gleaming language and aesthetically arresting metaphors. Here she offers instructions for living: "When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider / the orderliness of the world." Accepting the mantle of age, Oliver declares, "I am a woman sixty years old, and glory is my work." And glory is her gift to readers as she contemplates, as though for the first time, flowers, stone, water, the joyful grace of bounding dogs, the surprise of a snake, and the way words, love, and the sky open to us when we stay still, listen, and look. Bathed in the glow of all that she surveys, Oliver observes that death, too, is part of life's order and therefore beautiful. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; First edition edition (October 16, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306810735
• ISBN-13: 978-0306810732
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 7 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #136,616 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

A private person by nature, Mary Oliver has given very few interviews over the years. Instead, she prefers to let her work speak for itself. And speak it has, for the past five decades, to countless readers. The New York Times recently acknowledged Mary Oliver as "far and away, this country's best-selling poet." Born in a small town in Ohio, Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28; No Voyage and Other Poems, originally printed in the UK by Dent Press, was reissued in the United States in 1965 by Houghton Mifflin. Oliver has since published many works of poetry and prose. As a young woman, Oliver studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College, but took no degree. She lived for several years at the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay in upper New York state, companion to the poet's sister Norma Millay. It was there, in the late '50s, that she met photographer Molly Malone Cook. For more than forty years, Cook and Oliver made their home together, largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook's death in 2005. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, Oliver has received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She has also received the Shelley Memorial Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award; the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light; the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems; a Lannan Foundation Literary Award; and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence. Oliver's essays have appeared in Best American Essays 1996, 1998, 2001; the Anchor Essay Annual 1998, as well as Orion, Onearth and other periodicals. Oliver was editor of Best American Essays 2009. Oliver's books on the craft of poetry, A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance, are used widely in writing programs. She is an acclaimed reader and has read in practically every state as well as other countries. She has led workshops at various colleges and universities, and held residencies at Case Western Reserve University, Bucknell University, University of Cincinnati, and Sweet Briar College. From 1995, for five years, she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from The Art Institute of Boston (1998), Dartmouth College (2007) and Tufts University (2008). Oliver currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the inspiration for much of her work.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heaven in a wildflower., December 5, 2000

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Leaf And The Cloud: A Poem (Hardcover)

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets. (I recommend her NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (1993).) Although I could easily praise this new book of poems all day, I will keep my comments short. Oliver has taken the title of this book from John Ruskin, who wrote: "Between the earth and man arose the leaf. Between the heaven and man came the cloud. His life being partly as the falling leaf, and partly as the flying vapour." This reference is helpful, I think, in showing that Oliver's seven-poem progression is as much a meditation on the wonders of the natural world ("Everyday--I stare at the world; I push the grass aside/ and stare at the world," p. 9), as it is a profound prayer ("I look up/ into the faces of the stars,/ into their deep silence" p. 44).

Oliver is not the first poet to observe "heaven in a wildflower," but she has the unique ability to find poetry in nature. "What secrets fly out of the earth/ when I push the shovel-edge/ when I heave the dirt open?" (p. 21). She also writes, "It may be the rock in the field is also a song" (p. 14), and "maybe the world, without us,/ is the real poem" (p. 17). The poetry Oliver witnesses in the natural world is synonymous with God's presence. Through nature's beauty and mystery, Oliver discovers "If God exists he isn't just butter and good luck--/ he isn't just the summer day the red rose/ he's the snake he's the mouse,/ he's the hole in the ground" (p. 50).

The poetry here is earthy yet spiritual, simple yet profound. "Words are thunders of the mind" (p. 12). In addition to Ruskin and Blake, there are echoes of Whitman, Emerson, and Plato in these poems. This may be the best book of new poems I've read this year. It is also a good starting point for anyone who has never experienced the pleasures of poetry before.

G. Merritt

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Shaking Free", November 1, 2000

By 

Robert A. Wood "chip" (New England,USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Leaf And The Cloud: A Poem (Hardcover)

Mary Oliver's poetry takes away the breath and gives back breath; quickens the pulse and slows it; prays beside the need of the reader; opens most everything. This work, in particular, epic; enduring.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking, March 1, 2003

By 

Nanci "Book Dragon" (Tri-Cities, WA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Leaf And The Cloud: A Poem (Paperback)

As always, Mary Oliver's poetry simply takes my breath away. It is at the same time bound to earth and ethereal. She seems to be contemplating mortality, as well as the wonder of life as we live. Although one long poem, each stanza is a poem unto itself, each word a butterfly in your window.