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To read her work without this embodied sense is to miss the beauty of the energetic transmission within the words.

If you do not know this feeling in your body you will not be able to identify it purely from the mind. The words are unsophisticated but they are imbued with her lived sense.

This is not a cerebral concept, it is a felt sense in the body and Oliver’s poetry is drenched in this but without fanfare, without fluff and spin. That we are not indeed truly separate but appear so in manifest form. I believe that the critics are missing the core of her work which comes from an embodied sense of the ecstatic connection to all things. She wrote about perhaps uncool things like God and the natural world and has been called “earnest” amongst other patronizing things. I am aware of the criticisms of Mary Oliver’s work. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years.Ĭarefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career.
