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.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Susan Salter Reynolds
On the subject of writing poetry, Oliver is the most enlightened and enlightening author I have read, inspiring and chastening all at once...


From Kirkus Reviews
NBA and Pulitzerwinning Oliver takes a pedantic turn with this new collection of poetry, prose, and essays. The cumulative effect is an Emersonian Letters to a Young Poet that is lovely but grandstanding. In the essay ``Sister Turtle,'' Oliver writes of how she broke her vegetarianism. Here, as in many of the pieces, she celebrates her genteel ethical system even as she rebels against it. Of her herbivore's life, she writes: ``But I am devoted to Nature too, and to consider Nature without this appetitethis other-creature-consuming appetiteis to look with shut eyes upon the miraculous interchange that makes things work . . . . '' In another prose piece, ``The Swan,'' Oliver strikes a similarly highfalutin pose: ``I want each poem to indicate a life lived with intelligence, patience, passion, and whimsy . . . . Such self-loving attitudes, however, don't submerge her considerable gifts as an observer of nature. In one selection, she describes a scallop snapping its way through the water as it ``gazes around with its dozens of pale blue eyes.'' In another, she tells of the honeysuckle ``in a moist rage'' near the old burn dump. ``Sand Dabs,'' a series of aphorisms that Oliver began in an earlier book, has gleaming, Schegelian truisms (``Words are wood'') offset by bromides that might be embroidered on pillows (``Does the grain of sand / Know it is a grain of sand?''). Also included are several short essays on Frost, Hopkins, Poe, and Whitman, pieces that, unfortunately, resemble a schoolteacher's lessons more than a literary critic's elucidation. All in all, a pompous, pleasant ragbag. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Pittsburg Post Gazette
"A treat for those who know and like her poems and a good introduction for the general reader who has yet to discover her work."


Review
"A treat for those who know and like her poems and a good introduction for the general reader who has yet to discover her work."


Review
"A treat for those who know and like her poems and a good introduction for the general reader who has yet to discover her work."


Book Description
"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 the sudden powerful flight of swans, 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 unescapable 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."


About the Author
Mary Oliver has written more than ten volumes of poetry and prose and is one of America's best-selling and most honored poets, a winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. A longtime resident of Provincetown, Massachusetts, she is now on the faculty of Bennington College in Vermont.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
To believe in the soul -- to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view -- imagine the consequences!

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Mary Oliver talks here of turtle eggs and housebuilding, of her surprise at the sudden powerful flight of swans, 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."

SYNOPSIS

With the grace and precision that have won her legions of admirers, Oliver talks of turtle eggs and housebuilding, of her surprise at the powerful flight of swans, and of the "thousand unbreakable links between us and everything else".

FROM THE CRITICS

Pittsburg Post Gazette