The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays [Hardcover]

From a poet who teaches us the beauty and magic of the natural world comes a reminder that this world includes the creatures, with their / thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their / infallible sense of what their lives / are meant to be.

InThe Truro Bear and Other Adventures, Mary Oliver brings together ten new poems, thirty-five of her classic poems, and two essays, all about mammals, insects, and reptiles. The award-winning poet considers beasts of all kinds: bears, snakes, spiders, porcupines, humpback whales, hermit crabs, and, of course, her beloved and disobedient little dog, Percy, who appears and even speaks in thirteen poems, the closing section of this volume.

As Renée Loth has observed in theBoston Globe, Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1983, is my choice for her joyous, accessible, intimate observations of the natural world . . . She teaches us the profound act of paying attention.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver, The Summer Day (one of the poems in this volume)Poems In This Volume
The Chance to Love Everything
The Gesture
Porcupine
Toad
One Hundred White-sided Dolphins on a Summer Day
The Kitten
Ghosts
Carrying the Snake to the Garden
The Opossum
This Is the One
At Herring Cove
Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered
Turtle
The Other Kingdoms
Swimming with Otter
Black Snake
Five A.M. in the Pinewoods
Humpbacks
Moles
The Snow Cricket
Whelks
A Meeting
The Gift
The Truro Bear
Alligator Poem
The Hermit Crab
Hannah’s Children
Pipefish
This Too
Swoon
How Turtles Come to Spend the Winter in the Aquarium, Then Are Flown South and Released Back Into the Sea
The Poet Goes to Indiana
The Summer DayOliver has the ability to transform everyday life events into something extraordlCM