New and Selected Poems [Hardcover]

Mary Oliver (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 1992

Winner of the 1992 National Book Award for Poetry

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 1993

"One of the astonishing aspects of [Oliver's] work is the consistency of tone over this long period. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets. . . .
These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward."
-Stephen Dobyns, The New York Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As Diane Wakoski has noted, the power of Mary Oliver's Frost-influenced pastoral writing is in her ability to cast a spell, to create "the illusion that the natural world is graspable." Oliver's fierce independence, beautiful imagery, and love and knowledge of the natural world are all driven by a searching mind, expressed in poems that make for good company. In Some Questions You Might Ask, Oliver gives us this one to chew over: "Is the soul solid, like iron?/ or is it tender and breakable, like/ the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?" Highly recommended.

From Publishers Weekly

This collection brings together poetry from eight of Oliver's previously published books and 30 new poems. In all of her work, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive , Oliver, "full of curiosity," writes about the natural world, engaging the entwined processes of life and death. "Amazement" figures in her persistent attention to things seen: "If you notice anything / it leads you to notice / more / and more." Description then leads to meditation, a leap beyond the material world. Fundamentally religious in impulse, many of the poems move quickly away from concrete description. Metaphors are not quite grounded in the real; rather, they are asserted, declared. Of a bear the one poem's speaker notes, "all day I think of her-- / her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love." Even though this bear flicks the grass with her tongue, sharpens her claws against the "silence/of the trees," the reader cannot quite see her. It's as if Oliver reports on mysteries rather than embodying them. And so, despite its undeniable music, her work too often becomes rhetorical; too often its earnestness turns preachy and its feeling becomes sentimental.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 255 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press; First edition. edition (September 23, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807068187
• ISBN-13: 978-0807068182
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,170,428 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oliver's poetry is an unmasking of the natural world., January 4, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

Mary Oliver is living proof that poetry is not something that was invented, rather something that has been present since creation, in us and in nature, waiting to be discovered. And for the last thirty years Mary Oliver has not so much written poetry, but searched for, and discovered, the poetry that has existed in the world all along. It is, of course, much more complicated than that. Oliver's poetry is crafted with delicate, precise language. She lays her words out lazily across the page, often breaking the poem into three or four beat lines, letting a metaphor string out through an entire stanza. It is her imagery, her close observance of the world, that leads to the "ideas" in her poems. There is a moment in nearly all of her poems where the speaker moves from the exterior to the interior, from the water-lily cracking open to the creases in the human heart. What makes her poetry work is that none of this seems forced. It is as if she is taking the reader by the hand and saying, "Look! The sun is rising. Watch it with me for a moment and we'll decide for ourselves why it rises. For certainly, it must have its reasons."

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Power, Elegance, and Beauty!, September 25, 2003

By 

Jacob M. Winkler (Boulder, Colorado) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

Mary Oliver writes consistently moving, earthy poetry that reaches deep into what it means to live. I find her work magical, especially the way her writing about natural phenomena and animal relationships means so much to actual interactions with people. What's wonderful here is that Mary Oliver writes about the meta-story of human experience. Instead of delivering the poignancy of a personal story of romance, tragedy or success in the personal sphere, Oliver takes an image from nature and her experience with nature and weaves a story that has relevance for all people, no matter their cultural background. This writing could inspire the leaders of our civilization just as much as it could inspire tribal chiefs of aboriginal people. For example:

Sunrise

You can
die for it--
an idea,
or the world. People

have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound

to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But

this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought

of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, and it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moves the soul to new dimensions of feeling., August 22, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

Languid use of language to paint a picture of our souls. "The Journey" shook the very foundation of my being. It is my journey. It is me. How I tremble when someone comes so close to my soul. How hard to turn your back and "do the thing you are determined to do". I think this poem may have save my life today.