Our May 2019 Book Cafe features a PICK ONE selection. Participants will choose one from three suggested collections of the poetry of Mary Oliver, who died January 2019. Our “pick one” approach for May will provide access to more of Oliver’s luminous poetry, as participants will share from a greater variety of her verse.
Why I Wake Early: New Poems
The forty-seven new works in this volume include poems on crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears, greeting the morning, watching the deer, and, finally, lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who considers the everyday in our lives and the natural world around us and finds a multitude of reasons to wake early.
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
Carefully 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. This timeless volume, a personal selection of her best work, arranged by Oliver herself, spans more than five decades of her esteemed literary career and showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.
A Thousand Mornings: Poems
In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life’s work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her treasured dog Percy, Oliver is open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments and explores with startling clarity, humor, and kindness the mysteries of our daily experience.
