New and Selected Poems, Volume Two (Paperback)

by Mary Oliver (Author) "In the north country now it is spring and there is a certain celebration..." (more)

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 178 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (April 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080706887X
• ISBN-13: 978-0807068878
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #21,599 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

97 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oliver integrates craft and heightened awareness., June 23, 1999

By A Customer

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

Every poem in this book is a gem, and the collection made me want to read her complete works. While this is definitely not "religious poetry" of the greeting card variety, it is an expression of a deep spiritual awareness. Oliver's poems often reveal an amazement and wonder at being alive. Poetic skill and heightened awareness are so well-integrated, those who are looking for well-crafted poetry will certainly find it, and those who are looking for an awakening of consciousness may also find that.

Although Oliver's environment, her field of play, is nature, I wouldn't reduce her to a "naturalist poet." Nature is always interpreted and absorbed by her vision. Nature reveals its secrets to her, but they are the secrets of her own soul. In her poetry, nature is the oracle that reveals the human psyche.

But I should include Oliver's own words, because no prose critique can do justice to the intoxicating natural imagery of her poems. In the poem "Peonies", the richness and fertility of nature mirror the same qualities of the imagination:

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready to break my heart

as the sun rises,

as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open- pools of lace,

white and pink- and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes into the curls,

craving the sweet sap,...

The poem ends with a challenge that reverberates through the book. In spite of the sense of death looming sometimes on the edge of the poem (and our lives), sometimes at the center, are we willing to fully experience life?

Do you love this world?

Do you cherish your humble and silky life?

Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,

and softly,

and exclaiming of their dearness,

fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,

their eagerness

to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are

nothing forever?

24 of 25 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."

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking clarity, sanity, and tender love of this world, October 19, 1998

By A Customer

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

Mary Oliver's poem "The Journey" came into my life when I was seriously ill and in desperate need of permission to rest. That poem became a talisman, a mentor, a voice ringing with sanity. I have shared it with many, many people over the last 10 years.... I've yet to encounter another poet whose voice is as pure, clear, lucid, and present. Mary's poems combine all the wonder of early childhood with the exquisite vision and discernment of someone who deeply, minutely, wildly loves Creation. Her poems are blessings, nothing less.