Winter Hours [Hardcover]

Mary Oliver (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 1999

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, her most personal book yet "What good company Mary Oliver is!" the Los Angeles Times has remarked. And never more so than in this extraordinary and engaging gathering of nine essays, accompanied by a brief selection of new prose poems and poems. (One of the essays has been chosen as among the best of the year by THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 1998, another by The Anchor Essay Annual.) With the grace and precision that have won her legions of admirers, Oliver talks here of turtle eggs and housebuilding, of her surprise at an unexpected whistling she hears, of the "thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else." She talks of her own poems and of some of her favorite poets: Poe, writing of "our inescapable destiny," Frost and his ability to convey at once that "everything is all right, and everything is not all right," the "unmistakably joyful" Hopkins, and Whitman, seeking through his poetry "the replication of a miracle." And Oliver offers us a glimpse as well of her "private and natural self -- something that must in the future be taken into consideration by any who would claim to know me."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Poet Mary Oliver wants us to consider the many disparate elements of Winter Hours as "a long and slowly arriving letter--somewhat disorderly, natural in expression, and happily unfinished." And what a welcome letter it is. Oliver touches on the building of houses and the laying of turtle eggs. She ponders the work of Frost ("Everything is all right, say the meter and the rhyme; everything is not all right, say the words"), Poe, Whitman, and Hopkins. She includes some of her own poems and prose poems. And she speaks beautifully of the work of poem-building.

Perhaps more than any other poet writing today, Oliver is an inhabitant and deep observer of the natural world, a place without which, she says, she could not be a poet. All of her poems have been "if not finished at least started--somewhere out-of-doors," and her appreciation of the out-of-doors is all encompassing, defiant of standard classifications. "The world," she says, "is made up of cats, and cattle, and fenceposts!" Oliver so embraces the outdoors that one feels terrible for her that "the labor of writing poems" is so antithetical to being in nature. "Only oddly, and not naturally ... are we found, while awake, in the posture of deliberate or hapless inaction," she says. "But such is the posture of the poet, poor laborer." It is our good fortune that she makes the sacrifice, so that we can experience, through her poems, "the nudge, the prick of the instant, the flame of appreciation that shoots from my heels to my head when compass grass bends its frilled branches and draws a perfect circle on the cold sand." --Jane Steinberg

From Publishers Weekly

The usually remote and discreet Oliver, who has won the NBA and Pulitzer Prize for her poetry, comes to the autobiographical fore in this odd miscellany. The prose piece "Sister Turtle" tells of how Oliver, in an act of weird communion with a mother turtle she tracks through the woods, breaks her vegetarian regime to eat the eggs she thieves from the turtle's sandy nest. "Swoon" gorgeously describes a spider weaving her "chaotic" web in the corner of a rented house's stairwell, her egg sac like a "Lilliputian gas balloon." When the spider, dramatic and balletic, kills a windfall cricket, Oliver's close attention to and lack of ease with nature make this essay more immediate and arresting than the collection's several poems. The continuation of the "Sand Dabs" series from two earlier books includes, in "Sand Dabs, Four" deflated lines like "The arena of things, the theater of the imagination, the everywhere of faith." Her inspirational abstractionsA"Does the grain of sand/Know it is a grain of sand?"Acast doubt upon the stronger lines by association. As a belle lettristAthe collection contains brief meditations on Poe, Frost, Hopkins and WhitmanAOliver is clear and winningly didactic, but the collection as a whole never quite feels cohesive or purposeful.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (April 27, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395850843
• ISBN-13: 978-0395850848
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #761,940 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

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a look into the world of Mary Oliver, June 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Winter Hours (Hardcover)

In this slim volume three different styles of her writing are displayed beautifully."The Swan" will impress you."Building the house" will show you the process of building in poetic terms. Any Oliver fan needs this book!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pulls You In, January 3, 2008

By 

Ray Daniels (Wandering the USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (Paperback)

I was given this book and have found it comfortably engaging, gently surprising and satisfying complete--like a bowl of gourmet soup. A stunning display of the writers craft, an eye that dotes on nature's details and a mind that deftly connects reader to subject. A joy.

5.0 out of 5 stars Never enough, more than enough....., September 8, 2011

By 

deborah c lupton - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (Paperback)

Somehow this edition of Mary Oliver's poetry keeps calling me...This is the third copy I've ordered in two years, always thinking I don't have one available or at hand. Thank you Mary Oliver, for getting me through the writing of my dissertation with a book of prose and poetry that brings me back into the center of being and soothes the furrowed brow.