From Library Journal
In her seventh book, Oliver--Pulitzer Prize winner for her 1984 collection, American Primitive ( LJ 2/15/83)--carries readers into her vivid landscape and involves them in her process of discovery and recognition--from the tiny white spot in the distance, to the realization that it's a bird, to the name and song of the bird. This is a poet who rhetorically asks: "how could there be a day in your whole life/ that doesn't have its splash of happiness?" Lyrical lines move gracefully across the page as the spirituality mounts. One is tempted to call these poems too "poetic" or "romantic," but Oliver does not avoid nature's cruelty. With original, compelling vision, she discovers the same "splash of happiness" in the snow shining around a beggar boy or the smile of a woman cleaning toilets in Indonesia. Recommended.- Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New YorkCopyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
Winner of a 1991 Christopher AwardWinner of the 1991 Boston Globe Lawrence L. Winship Book AwardThis collection of poems by Mary Oliver once again invites the reader to step across the threshold of ordinary life into a world of natural and spiritual luminosity. "Oliver's poems are thoroughly convincing—as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring."-The New York Times Book Review

FROM THE PUBLISHER