The Leaf and the Cloud

by Mary Oliver

Overview

An astonishing book-length poem in seven parts from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

With piercing clarity and craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned an unforgettable poem of questioning and discovery, about what is observable and what is not, about what passes and what persists. 

"It's hard to imagine anyone putting down Oliver's book-length poem and not sighing with satisfaction, so sensible is every word and thought." —Virginia Quarterly Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780306810732
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	10/17/2001
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Born in a small town in Ohio, Mary Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28. Over the course of her long career, she received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Bennington College, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching. She was the author of more than twenty books, including The Leaf and the Cloud and Long Life. Her many accolades include the National Book Award. She died in 2019.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

    Flare

    1.

    Welcome to the silly, comforting poem.

It is not the sunrise,
which is a red rinse,
which is flaring all over the eastern sky;

it is not the rain falling out of the purse of God;

it is not the blue helmet of the sky afterward,

or the trees, or the beetle burrowing into the earth;

it is not the mockingbird who, in his own cadence,
will go on sizzling and clapping
from the branches of the catalpa that are thick with blossoms,
   that are billowing and shining,
      that are shaking in the wind.

    2.

    You still recall, sometimes, the old barn on your great-grandfather's
farm, a place you visited once, and went into, all alone, while the grownups
sat and talked in the house.

    It was empty, or almost. Wisps of hay covered the floor, and some
wasps sang at the windows, and maybe there was a strange fluttering bird
high above, disturbed, hoo-ing a little and staring down from a messy ledge
with wild, binocular eyes.

    Mostly, though, it smelled of milk, and the patience of animals; the
give-offs of the body were still in the air, a vague ammonia, not unpleasant.

    Mostly, though, it was restful and secret, the roof high up and arched,
the boards unpaintedand plain.

    You could have stayed there forever, a small child in a corner, on the
last raft of hay, dazzled by so much space that seemed empty, but wasn't.

    Then—you still remember—you felt the rap of hunger—it was noon—and
you turned from that twilight dream and hurried back to the house,
where the table was set, where an uncle patted you on the shoulder for
welcome, and there was your place at the table.

3.

    Nothing lasts.

There is a graveyard where everything I am talking about is,
now.

I stood there once, on the green grass, scattering flowers.

4.

Nothing is so delicate or so finely hinged as the wings
of the green moth
against the lantern

against its heat
against the beak of the crow
in the early morning.

Yet the moth has trim, and feistiness, and not a drop
   of self-pity.

Not in this world.

5.

My mother
was the blue wisteria,
my mother
was the mossy stream out behind the house,
my mother, alas, alas,
did not always love her life,
heavier than iron it was
as she carried it in her arms, from room to room,
oh, unforgettable!

I bury her
in a box
in the earth
and turn away.
My father
was a demon of frustrated dreams,
was a breaker of trust,
was a poor, thin boy with bad luck.
He followed God, there being no one else
he could talk to;
he swaggered before God, there being no one else
who would listen.

Listen,
this was his life.
I bury it in the earth.
I sweep the closets.
I leave the house.

6.

I mention them now,
I will not mention them again.

It is not lack of love
nor lack of sorrow.
But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.

I give them—one, two, three, four—the kiss of courtesy,
   of sweet thanks,
of anger, of good luck in the deep earth.
May they sleep well. May they soften.

But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.
I will not give them the responsibility for my life.

7.

Did you know that the ant has a tongue
with which to gather in all that it can
of sweetness?

Did you know that?

Table of Contents

	Flare	1
	Work	9
	From The Book of Time	17
	Riprap	25
	Rhapsody	33
	Gravel	37
	Evening Star	47
	Acknowledgments	55

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Mary Oliver

"A master of spare and evocative imagery."—Poetry

"What good company Mary Oliver is!"—Los Angeles Times

"A great poet....She is amazed but not blinded."—Boston Globe

"The gift of Oliver's poetry is that she communicates the beauty she finds in the world and makes is unforgettable."—Miami Herald

"Oliver's poems are thoroughly convincing as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring."—The New York Times

"Oliver might be accused of an untransformed and reactionary romanticism. One would think that poems about self, nature, death, and ecstasy had run their course in English. Think again."—Chicago Tribune

"Who wouldn't want to be part of Mary Oliver's world?"—Appalachian Review

From the Publisher

Reading one of Oliver's poems is like stepping back into the Eden of childhood.

San Diego Union Tribune

Those familiar with Oliver's work will not be caught off guard by her latest, essentially one long piece comprised of seven poems. Each is further broken down into numbered sections in which long and short lines are jumbled together, and stanzaic patterns appear and vanish, seemingly at random. It has the look of "experimental" poetry, but while the arrangement is looser and more expansive than in many of her earlier collections, her subject is the same: the natural world and her (read "our") spiritual connection to it. Oliver has not yet exhausted the possibilities of nature—her attention to detail is sharp, her descriptions often beautifully apt and touching. At the beginning of the second section, she proclaims, "I am a woman sixty years old and of no special courage." Such droll moments are rare, but they introduce a welcome humility to work that elsewhere lapses into piety and self-importance, especially in the many catalogues of images. There, the author sounds like a poet more under the spell of Whitman than Frost, who is clearly another influence. This need not be a bad thing, except that it induces sentiments like "I will sing for the iron doors of the prison / and for the broken doors of the poor, / and for the sorrow of the rich, who are mistaken and lonely." Also bothersome are the frequent references to the poem itself ("Welcome to the silly, comforting poem"). But there is finally little comfort in the pivotal question—"what does it mean, that the world is beautiful"—when we know, as the poet must, that the answer could easily be "nothing." Maintains the status quo of Oliver's previous work, but breaks no new ground.Reading, Peter MARFAN Bloodaxe (64 pp.) paperback original Sep. 29, 2000

Kirkus Reviews