Evidence

Finally in paperback, a collection of forty-six poems that delve into the mysteries of life, love, and death
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Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Mary Oliver offers us poems of arresting beauty that reflect on the power of love and the great gifts of the natural world. 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,” she uncovers the evidence presented to us daily by nature, in rivers and stones, willows and field corn, the mockingbird’s “embellishments” or the last hours of darkness. “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.”
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In “When I Was Young and Poor,” she writes:
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When I was young and poor,
when little was much,
when I was nimble and never tired
and the hours of the day were deep and long,
where was the end that was already committed?
Where was the flesh that thinned and stiffened?
Nowhere, nowhere!
Just the gift of forgetfulness gracious and kind
while I ran up hills and drank the wind—
time out of mind.

Mary Oliver, winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, was acknowledged by the New York Times Book Review as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.” Her twenty books of poetry in-clude Swan, The Truro Bear and Other Adventures, and Red Bird. Oliver lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.