The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays

by Mary Oliver

Overview

The Truro Bear and Other Adventures, a companion volume to Owls and Other Fantasies and Blue Iris, brings together ten new poems, thirty-five of Oliver's classic poems, and two essays all about mammals, insects, and reptiles. The award-winning poet considers beasts of all kinds: bears, snakes, spiders, porcupines, humpback whales, hermit crabs, and, of course, her beloved but disobedient little dog, Percy.

This book was published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the book with one of the available covers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807068854
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	04/01/2010
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

A private person by nature, Mary Oliver (1935–2019) gave very few interviews over the years. Instead, she preferred to let her work speak for itself. And speak it has, for the past five decades, to countless readers. The New York Times recently acknowledged Mary Oliver as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.” Born in a small town in Ohio, Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28; No Voyage and Other Poems, originally printed in the UK by Dent Press, was reissued in the United States in 1965 by Houghton Mifflin. Oliver has since published twenty books of poetry and six books of prose. As a young woman, Oliver studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College, but took no degree. She lived for several years at the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay in upper New York state, companion to the poet’s sister Norma Millay. It was there, in the late ’50s, that she met photographer Molly Malone Cook. For more than forty years, Cook and Oliver made their home together, largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook’s death in 2005. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, Oliver has received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She has also received the Shelley Memorial Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award; the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light; the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems; a Lannan Foundation Literary Award; and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence. Oliver’s essays have appeared in Best American Essays 1996, 1998, 2001; the Anchor Essay Annual 1998, as well as Orion, Onearth and other periodicals. Oliver was editor of Best American Essays 2009. Oliver’s books on the craft of poetry, A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance, are used widely in writing programs. She is an acclaimed reader and has read in practically every state as well as other countries. She has led workshops at various colleges and universities, and held residencies at Case Western Reserve University, Bucknell University, University of Cincinnati, and Sweet Briar College. From 1995, for five years, she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from The Art Institute of Boston (1998), Dartmouth College (2007) and Tufts University (2008).

Table of Contents

Poems In This Volume
The Chance to Love Everything
The Gesture
Porcupine
Toad
One Hundred White-sided Dolphins on a Summer Day
The Kitten
Ghosts
Carrying the Snake to the Garden
The Opossum
This Is the One
At Herring Cove
Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered
Turtle
The Other Kingdoms
Swimming with Otter
Black Snake
Five A.M. in the Pinewoods
Humpbacks
Moles
The Snow Cricket
Whelks
A Meeting
The Gift
The Truro Bear
Alligator Poem
The Hermit Crab
Hannah’s Children
Pipefish
This Too
Swoon
How Turtles Come to Spend the Winter in the Aquarium, Then Are Flown South and Released Back Into the Sea
The Poet Goes to Indiana
The Summer Day

Editorial Reviews

Oliver has the ability to transform everyday life events into something extraordinary. . . . [She shows us a natural world that is too often forgotten, in all its humor, grace and absolute loveliness.] —Emily Nicklin, Nature Conservancy

"Oliver, one of the country's most popular and highly awarded poets, presents . . . beautifully tempered lyrics celebrating the splendor of the living world . . . Oliver's signature tropes are as vital as ever-her beloved birds, dogs, snakes, and ocean are all summoned to capture the breathtaking glory of life." —Booklist

"The work of Mary Oliver is one of those rare and lovely convergences. She is a lyric artist with a riveted eye and an enormous heart, one of the nation's great spiritual sentinels."—Brian Doyle, Christian Century

"These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward."—Stephen Dobyns, New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher