Beacon Press: Evidence
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Evidence

Poems

Author: Mary Oliver

A new volume of poems by one of America’s most loved and respected poets

Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” Evidence is a collection of forty-seven new poems on all of Mary Oliver’s classic themes. She writes perceptively about grief and mortality, love and nature, and the spiritual sustenance she draws from their gifts. Ever grateful for the bounty that is offered to us daily by the natural world, Oliver is attentive to the mysteries it imparts. The arresting beauty she finds in rivers and stones, willows and field corn, the mockingbird’s “embellishments” or the last hours of darkness permeates her poems. Her newest volume is imbued through and through with that power of nature to, in Oliver’s words, “excite the viewers toward sublime thought.”

Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Oliver is a skilled guide to the rarest and most exquisite insights of the natural world. “After a few hours in her quiet, exuberant presence,” writes Los Angeles Times columnist Susan Salter Reynolds, “one feels as though the raw sunlight in the room, the brightness of the water, the white wood and flashing wings outside the window are bleaching unimportant details from the day.” From one of America’s most loved and respected poets, this new volume plumbs the evidence of our most profound mysteries.
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“The work of Mary Oliver is one of those rare and lovely convergences. She is a lyric artist with a riveted eye and an enormous heart, one of the nation’s great spiritual sentinels.” —Brian Doyle, Christian Century

“Mary Oliver is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making. The humbling effect of that perspective is her lasting gift to readers.” —Harvard Review

“I should be clear that Mary Oliver is, to my mind, one of the most gifted American poets working in English today. In her hands, the language acquires a lucidity approaching translucence; the accuracy of her vision and the precision of her voice are unique in their refreshing simplicity. Perhaps most singular is the tendency of her poems to be at once powerful and appealing; an affection for the natural world and a sympathy toward the reader abide.” —Katherine Hollander, Pleiades

Reviews

Review by: Donna Seaman, Booklist - March 1, 2009
“Oliver has been publishing poetry collections since 1963, and her latest is gloriously alive, inquisitive, and welcoming."
  • Click here to see Oliver mentioned in The New York Times Book Review's "Inside the List" feature
  • A recent New York Times explored Provincetown through the work of Mary Oliver

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Evidence

ISBN: 978-080706898-4
 Publication Date: 4/1/2009
 Pages: 88
 Size: x Inches (US)
Price:  $24.00
Format: Cloth
Availability: In stock.
Categories: