New and Selected Poems, Volume Two [Paperback]

Mary Oliver has been writing poetry for nearly five decades, and in that time she has become America's foremost poetic voice on our experience of the physical world. This collection presents forty-two new poems-an entire volume in itself-along with works chosen by Oliver from six of the books she has published sinceNew and Selected Poems, Volume One.It has always seemed, across her 15 books of poetry, five of prose and several essays and chapbooks, that Mary Oliver might leave us at any minute. Even a 1984 Pulitzer Prize couldn't pin her to the ground. She'd change quietly into a heron or a bear and fly or walk on forever. —Susan Salter Reynolds,Los Angeles Times

Oliver's poetry is of the Earth, and about the Earth, and as these poems give voice to the planet, they render human life more beautiful, more sentient, more meaningful. —Karen McCarthy,ForeWord

These are life-enhancing and redemptive poems that coax the sublime from the subliminal. —Sally Connolly,Poetry

Mary's Oliver poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations. —Stanley Kunitz

Oliver's poems are thoroughly convincing—as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring. —New York Times Book ReviewA private person by nature,Mary Oliver(1935–2019) gave very few interviews over the years. Instead, she preferred to let her work speak for itself. And speak it has, for the past five decades, to countless readers. TheNew York Timesrecently acknowledged Mary Oliver as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.” Born in a small town in Ohio, Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28;No Voyage and Other Poems, originally printed in the UK by Dent Press, was reissued in the UnitedlÓ+