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    West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems
    West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems
    West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems
    Ebook70 pages37 minutes

    West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

    By Mary Oliver

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    About this ebook

    A collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winner whose poems have been praised “as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring” (The New York Times).

    In this stunning collection of forty poems—nineteen previously unpublished—she writes of nature and love, of the way they transform over time. And the way they remain constant. And what did you think love would be like? A summer day? The brambles in their places, and the long stretches of mud? Flowers in every field, in every garden, with their soft beaks and their pastel shoulders? On one street after another, the litter ticks in the gutter. In one room after another, the lovers meet, quarrel, sicken, break apart, cry out. One or two leap from windows. Most simply lean, exhausted, their thin arms on the sill. They have done all they could. The golden eagle, that lives not far from here, has perhaps a thousand tiny feathers flowing from the back of its head, each one shaped like an infinitely small but perfect spear.

    “From the chaos of the world, her poems distill what it means to be human and what is worthwhile about life.” —Library Journal

    “Her poems do indeed make us ‘shiver with praise.’” —Booklist
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 7, 1998
    ISBN9780547525761
    West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems
    Author

    Mary Oliver

    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.

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    • 4/5
      One of my friends recommended this poet. My friend teaches poetry at a university and had published her own books (look up Dr. Amy George) on Amazon. She said she loves Mary Oliver so I quickly jumped at the chance to read one of her works. It is quite heartfelt, real, and a book made to pair with a cup of tea.
    • 4/5
      The majority of these poems are drawn from living in the natural world, its creatures, weather, trees and streams. A few feature a companion animal or a person, and I think I spotted one which alluded to the behavior of people in society. Every one takes on its individual form, not usually formal. There are prose poems but these are if anything more restrained than the others, as though the naturalness of prose needed to be kept. But I always feel a sort of mystery surrounding her words, whether sharp or placid.

      The ones that spoke to me the most were "Stars," "Maples," and "Rain, Tree, Thunder and Lightning." Maybe I have a prejudice against the ones which feature animals? or maybe it is because these are closest to the kind of poetry I spend the most time with.

    Book preview

    West Wind - Mary Oliver

    title page

    Contents

    Title Page

    Contents

    Copyright

    Dedication

    Part I

    Seven White Butterflies

    At Round Pond

    Black Oaks

    The Dog Has Run Off Again

    Am I Not Among the Early Risers

    Pilot Snake

    So

    Spring

    Stars

    Three Songs

    Shelley

    Maples

    The Osprey

    That Sweet Flute John Clare

    Sand Dabs, Three

    Forty Years

    Black Snake This Time

    Morning Walk

    Rain, Tree, Thunder and Lightning

    The Rapture

    Fox

    Gratitude

    Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith

    Dogs

    At the Shore

    At Great Pond

    Part 2

    West Wind

    Part 3

    Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches

    Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    Connect with HMH

    Copyright © 1997 by Mary Oliver

    All rights reserved

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

    hmhbooks.com

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Oliver, Mary, date.

    West wind / Mary Oliver.

    p. cm.

    ISBN 0-395-85082-7

    I. Title.

    PS3565.L5W4 1997

    811'.54 —dc 21 97-2986 CIP

    v2.0119

    eISBN 9780547525761

    FOR

    MOLLY MALONE COOK

    Part I

    Some persons of a scientific turn were once discoursing pompously and, to him, distastefully, about the incredible distance of the planets, the length of time light takes to travel to the earth, &c., when he burst out, ’Tis false! I was walking down a lane the other day, and at the end of it I touched the sky with my stick.

    —Life and Works of William Blake, A. Gilchrist

    Seven White Butterflies

    Seven white butterflies

    delicate in a hurry look

    how they bang the pages

    of their wings as they fly

    to the fields of mustard yellow

    and orange and plain

    gold all eternity

    is in the moment this is what

    Blake said Whitman said such

    wisdom in the agitated

    motions of the mind seven

    dancers floating

    even as worms toward

    paradise see how they banter

    and riot and rise

    to the trees flutter

    lob their white bodies into

    the invisible wind weightless

    lacy willing

    to

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