Book cover for What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems by Mary Oliver

What Do We Know

Poems and Prose Poems

2003 Released
88 Pages
1-2 Hours
Ebook Unavailable
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Grand Central PublishingISBN 9780306812064
Forty poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver

"Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing," wrote Stanley Kunitz. For the many admirers of Mary Oliver's dazzling poetry and luminous vision, as well as for those who may be coming to her work for the first time, What Do We Know will be a revelation. These forty poems-of observing, of searching, of pausing, of astonishment, of giving thanks embrace in every sense the natural world, its unrepeatable moments and its ceaseless cycles. Mary Oliver evokes unforgettable images from one hundred white-sided dolphins on a summer day to bees that have memorized every stalk and leaf in a field even as she reminds us, after Emerson, that "the invisible and imponderable is the sole fact."

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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