I don''t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Few modern poets are as beloved or as quoted as Mary Oliver. Spanning the major decades of her long career, this collection showcases Oliver''s remarkable lyrical powers and her reverential attention to the natural world. Her poetry sees life everywhere and asks what to do with it - how can we find our place among such beauty, such pain? Populated by wading birds, early snowfalls, and swaying cornfields, her reflections are the record of a life spent walking alone in the wild. These timeless poems meet and touch their reader in any season of life, brightened by Oliver''s gift for amazement, shadowed by her constant awareness of harshness and death. Her words teach us to live with our eyes open wider.

Autorentext

Mary Oliver was born in rural Ohio in 1935. The author of more than 15 collections of poetry and essays, she is one of America's best-selling poets. Among her many honours, she was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive (1983) and a National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, Volume One (1992). She received the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. For four decades, she lived on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with her partner Molly Malone Cook, writing while walking outside with her notebook.

Klappentext

'Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?'

One of America's best loved poets, Mary Oliver is also among nature's most brilliant and devoted observers, whose words ask us to live with our eyes open wider. This luminous selection brings together her best-known works from across her career.

'Oliver's poems are ... as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring' *New York Times Book Review
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'Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing' Stanley Kunitz

'Just a few seemingly simple phrases perfectly express what we need to know just then, in that moment' Oprah Winfrey

'It doesn't feel like you have to take a seminar in order to understand Mary Oliver's poetry. She's speaking directly to you as a human being' Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker