Winter Hours (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "I KNOW A YOUNG MAN who can build almost anything -a boat, a fence, kitchen cabinets, a table, a barn, a house..." (more)
Key Phrases: Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself, New York (more...)

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.com Sales Rank: #1,397,166 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 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

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!

3 of 3 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

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!

3 of 4 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.