Why I Wake Early: New Poems

This is what I'm talking about... There are things you can't reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God. And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier. From Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End? Certainly, Mary Oliver knows this haiku by Zen poet, Basho? The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers. What poem could you write?

Mary Oliver not only observes the natural world around here but finds language to express its many moods and meanings, linking them to her outer and inner life. The "simple" cadences of her lines carry a hidden depth to them. Well worth reading and meditating upon.

This slim volume is so aptly named - it could be the opposite of a lullaby - a book filled with "songs to awaken by"..... A pure celebration of life, I slowly reveled in each poem... at times gasping out loud by the gentle ferocity of the words and imagery. Favorites include "Where Does the Temple End and Where Does it Begin?" and "Just a Minute" said a voice. I know this is a title I will read over and over and over and over again..........

Mary Oliver has written a beautiful collection of 47 poems that shows her love of nature, and really why she does wake early to greet the day. One of the qualities of her writing that I most enjoyed is that she expresses her intricate love of nature with a joy that lacks sentimentality. She spends her time determining what she is seeing and hearing and writes about that rather than looking inward to how she feels about everything. Therefore, her joy and feeling come through in the words she chooses to describe her subjects, and not in a list of subjective feelings. For me, that made her poetry universal and a communication that I could share in. I highly recommend this book for both the poetry and nature lover.

In her 2002 book of poetry, WHAT DO WE KNOW, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet expressed her sense of wonder while listening to a loon at four a. m. (p. 64). In this new collection of 42 poems, she responds to the same question people have been asking me nearly all my life, "why wake up so early?" "It is what I was born for," Oliver explains, "to look, to listen,/ to lose myself/ inside this soft world--/ to instruct myself/ over and over/ in joy,/ and acclamation./ Nor am I talking/ about the exceptional,/ the fearful, the dreadful,/ the very extravagant--/ but of the ordinary,/ the common, the very drab,/ the daily presentations" ("Mindful," pp. 58-9). With a poet's gift of observation and a naturalist's eye for detail, Oliver turns her attention to the morning sun (p. 3), beans (p. 10), an arrowhead "found beside the river" (p. 11), trout lilies (p.12), a green snow cricket (p. 15), a swimming blacksnake (p. 19), clouds (p. 22), a marsh hawk floating in wide circles (p. 31), a flock of snow geese (p. 34), a bear track (p. 41), a luna moth "like a broken leaf" (p. 41), watching deer disappearing "into the impossible trees" (p. 49), "prayers that are made of grass" (p. 59), toads "sweet and alive in the sun" (p. 61), and the pleasures of lingering in happiness after a rain (p. 71) in these poems, always discovering the sacred within the ordinary. Whether she is "the madcap person clapping [her] hands and singing," or "that quiet person down on [her] knees" ("Sometimes," p. 39), readers will experience poetry in WHY I WAKE EARLY that Mary Oliver is best-known for, poetry that is earthy yet sacred, simple yet profound.G. Merritt