Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
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“Joy is not made to be a crumb,” writes Mary Oliver, and certainly joy abounds in her new book of poetry and prose poems. Swan, her twentieth volume, shows us that, though we may be “made out of the dust of stars,” we are of the world she captures here so vividly: the acorn that hides within it an entire tree; the wings of the swan like the stretching light of the river; the frogs singing in the shallows; the mockingbird dancing in air. Swan is Oliver’s tribute to “the mortal way” of desiring and living in the world, to which the poet is renowned for having always been “totally loyal.” As the Los Angeles Times noted, innumerable readers go to Oliver’s poetry “for solace, regeneration and inspiration.” Few poets express the immense complexities of human experience as skillfully, or capture so memorably the smallest nuances. Speaking, for example, of stones, she writes, “the little ones you can / hold in your hands, their heartbeats / so secret, so hidden it may take years / before, finally, you hear them.” It is no wonder Oliver ranks, according to the Weekly Standard, “among the finest poets the English language has ever produced.”
What Can I Say 1Of Time 2On the Beach 3How Perfectly 4How I Go to the Woods 5A Fox in the Dark 6Just Around the House, Early in the Morning 7Tom Dancer's Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone 8Passing the Unworked Field 10For Example 11Percy Wakes Me (Fourteen) 13Today 14Swan 15Beans Green and Yellow 16It Is Early 17How Many Days 18More of the Unfinishable Fox Story 19The Riders 20The Poet Dreams of the Classroom 21Dancing in Mexico 22The Sweetness of Dogs (Fifteen) 23Bird in the Pepper Tree 24In Provincetown, and Ohio, and Alabama 25April 26Torn 27Wind in the Pines 28The Living Together 29We Cannot Know 30The Poet Dreams of the Mountain 31Mist in the Morning, Nothing Around Me but Sand and Roses 32The Last Word About Fox (Maybe) 33How Heron Comes 34When 35Trees 36In Your Hands 37I Own a House 38I Worried 39Lark Ascending 40Don't Hesitate 42In the Darkness 43Four Sonnets 44Trying to Be Thoughtful in the First Brights of Dawn 48More Evidence 49Whispered Poem 54The Poet Is Told to Fill Up More Pages 55AfterwordPercy 59
