What Do We Know: Poems

Best read out loud. Poems about nature and life.

With her characteristic sense of wonder, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Mary Oliver, returns to the natural world in this new collection of forty poems. "Walking out into all of this with nowhere to go," she writes, "and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind" ("A Settlement," p. 45). Whether she's observing a hundred dolphins on a summer day, a mockingbird, a black snake on a flat rock, an owl with eyes "like burning moons" (p. 12), the "single-mindedness" of a hummingbird (p. 14), stones, a "beautifully acrobatic" raven (p. 16), a trapped turtle, clams ("each one is a small life, but sometimes long, if its place in the universe is not found out," p. 26), a heron, bumble bees that "have memorized/ every stalk and leaf/ of the field" (p. 30), crows "as cheerful as saints, or thieves of the small job" (p. 34), a lark, "the wet face of the lily" (p. 41), oranges, moonlight, a dead bat ("in death/ it was a mad architecture--/ its joints were too many; it shed/ all sound, all power--became/ a little heap of stiffness/ with a monkey face" (p. 46), a blue iris, or "the silence; the blank, white, glittering sublime" of an early snow (p. 57), Oliver pays attention to life deeply. Her poetry is earthy yet spiritual, simple yet profound, and life-affirming without exception. In my favorite poem in the collection, "The Loon," I, too, experienced the "rapture of being alive" upon hearing "the small,/ perfect voice" that caused Oliver to pause from her reading at four a.m. (p. 64).Reading Mary Oliver always reminds me of why I enjoy poetry. She has the ability to reveal heaven in a wildflower, and the wonders of God in every creature. In addition to this book of poetry, I also highly recommend Oliver's NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (1993) and THE LEAF AND THE CLOUD (2000).G. Merritt

I was worried about what this book of poems would be like--like so many of us, I am madly in love with this poet, and want her to go on forever. The urgency in the love song to the world that The Leaf and the Cloud was has been replaced with a coolness and a lightness that is exquisitely beautiful once you get over the fact that so much of this is about death. The supernatural is the theme of this book, with god with a capital G and angels and ghosts. I have never read her more vulnerable or as far away from us. But this is a beautiful book, a fantastic transition from her last works, showing what a truly great American poet she is.