Overview

A curated compendium of poetry and prose from the award-winning poet Mary Oliver, including the book-length masterpiece The Leaf and the Cloud, the collection What Do We Know, andessays from Long Life-with a foreword by fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Postcolonial Love Poem Natalie Diaz. For the many admirers of Mary Oliver's breathtaking poetry of touch and transcendence, as well as for those coming to her words for the first time, Little Alleluias is a revelation. These works observe, search, pause, astonish, and give thanks to both love and the natural world. In constant conversation with the sublime, (i.e. ""Are you afraid? / Somewhere a thousand swans are flying / through winter's worst storm.""), Oliver has the rare skill of rendering existence: her poems bring movement to stillness, and people to the Earth, themselves, and each other. Her essays declare her heart and her home, too, alongside thoughts on Wordsworth, Emerson, and Hawthorne-the odes and elegies of Provincetown's resident poet. On each page, Mary Oliver invites us to walk through her minutes, her moments, and revere the light and dark and rainbowed clothes of world alongside her. With three distinct books collected in one volume for the first time, Little Alleluias asks what passes and what persists, and offers readers the peace that every life deserves. ""Hers is a purposeful language, one that looks not just with attention but with sensual intention, and though awestruck, seeks to hold, even briefly, the unknowns of the energies that make any life. Little alleluias, she called her writings. Not meant to define but to praise, to rejoice in the maker and what has been made, to dare be heard as a whisper or a shout in this immense world.""-Natalie Diaz, in her Foreword

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9780306835810

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Reviews

Select Praise for Mary Oliver ""A master of spare and evocative imagery.""--Poetry ""A rigorous mind combined with a capacity for devotion; a desire to find the exact, economical, shining phrase; a wish to witness, and a wish to share.""--Chicago Tribune ""Oliver's poems are thoroughly convincing as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring.""--The New York Times

Author Information

Born in a small town in Ohio, Mary Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28. Over the course of her long career, she received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Bennington College, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching. Oliver died in 2019.

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