Blue Pastures collects fifteen prose works from Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning poet Mary Oliver.
"This transcendent collection is Oliver's joyful sharing of her love of her craft."--Library Journal
With consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned fifteen luminous prose pieces: on nature, writing, and herself and those around her. She praises Whitman, denounces cuteness, notes where to find the extraordinary, and extols solitude. Nature speaks to her and she speaks to nature.
"This book is biased, opinionated; also it is also joyful, and probably there is despair here too...But the reader will find the pleasures more certain, and more constant, than the rills of despond. Thus it has turned out in my life thus far, influenced by the sustaining passions: love of the wild world, love of literature, love for and from another person." -Mary Oliver
"The soliloquies in Blue Pastures--which seems intended as an informal sequel to her writer's manual, A Poetry Handbook--urge her readers to be as quiet as hunters, and to listen for the soft footfalls of art; inspiration, she insists, is rarely found in drawing rooms." -- New York Times
"The best part of the book is Oliver's plein-air poetizing, consisting of tidbits almost all jotted down "somewhere out-of-doors'': in her partial observations of nature ("Just at the lacey edge of the sea, a dolphin's skull''), her exhortations ("You must not ever stop being whimsical'') or an evocative list ("Molasses, an orange, fennel seed, anise seed, rye flour, two cakes of yeast''), readers catch the first whiffs of poetry." -- Publishers Weekly
"This transcendent collection is Oliver's joyful sharing of her love of her craft." -- Library Journal
Mary Oliver (1935-2019), one of the most popular and widely honored poets in the U.S., was the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, she received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for American Primitive in 1984. Oliver also received the Shelley Memorial Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award; the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light; the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems; a Lannan Foundation Literary Award; and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence. She lived most of her life in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Ecco Press
Pub Date: November 10, 1995
0.31" H x 8.46" L x 5.51" W
144 Pages
Paperback