A Thousand Mornings Author: Visit Amazon's Mary Oliver Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1594204772 | Format: EPUB
A Thousand Mornings Description
From Booklist
Beginning with her first poetry book in 1963, Oliver has chronicled her enthrallment to the living world, especially the land and sea surrounding Provincetown, Massachusetts, and her spiritual evolution. In her newest collection, her compact poems are conversational and teasing, yet their taproots reach deeply into the aquifers of religion, philosophy, and literature. Some read like brief fables, such as when an old fox compares their respective species and tells the poet, “You fuss, we live.” A Bob Dylan quote inspires a poem about song, while a mockingbird’s mimicry elicits thoughts about authenticity and one’s true self. The crucial and moving poem “Hum, Hum” describes a scarring childhood redeemed by the solace of the embracing, living world and the words of poets. Oliver is funny and renegade as she protests cultural vapidity, greed, violence, and environmental decimation and ravishing in her close readings of nature, such as the resplendent “Tides,” which surges like the sea. Ultimately, Oliver warns us that “the only ship there is / is the ship we are all on / burning the world as we go.” --Donna Seaman
About the Author
Born in a small town in Ohio, MARY OLIVER published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of twenty-eight. Over the course of her long career, she has received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She has led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Bennington College, where she held the Catherine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching. Oliver currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
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- Hardcover: 96 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; 1 edition (October 11, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1594204772
- ISBN-13: 978-1594204777
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
- Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
There is one complaint to be made about A Thousand Mornings: it is far too short -- 80 pages, and many of those pages are blank. However, when the pages are not blank, we are drawn into the world of Mary Oliver, and it is a world from which we do not eagerly depart!
The book opens with the wry humor of "I Go Down to the Shore," and moves from there to the Roethkean questionings of "I Happened to Be Standing": "But I thought, of the wren's singing, what could this be if it isn't a prayer?" There are several one-paragraph prose poems of "earth-praise," which will entice those readers who are willing to be enticed. There is a dialogue with a fox, resumed from earlier books, and a nod to Bob Dylan, expanding on one of the book's epigraphs, Dylan's words: "Anything worth thinking about is also worth singing about." Oliver speaks of growth in the midst of devastation in the poem "Hurricane"; and this reader smiled at "Three Things to Remember," even if the poem was too baldly "proverbial."
The change of the seasons, summer to autumn, is depicted in "Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness," although to be sure, there is metaphoric darkness:
So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
The title poem, "A Thousand Mornings," is a prose-poem of a single sentence, but we do not indict the poem for brevity, when it speaks of "mak[ing] its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing...
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