House of Light

by Mary Oliver

Overview

This collection of poems by Mary Oliver once again invites the reader to step across the threshold of ordinary life into a world of natural and spiritual luminosity.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day" (one of the poems in this volume)

Winner of a 1991 Christopher Award

Winner of the 1991 Boston Globe Lawrence L. Winship Book Award

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807068113
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	04/08/1992
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	82,922
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.28(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

Some Questions You Might Ask
Moccasin Flowers
The Buddha’s Last Instruction
Spring
Singapore
The Hermit Crab
Lilies
Wings
The Swan
The Kingfisher
Indonesia
“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”
Turtle
The Deer
The Loon on Oak-Head Pond
What Is It?
Writing Poems
Some Herons
Five A.M. in the Pinewoods
Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard
The Gift
Pipefish
The Kookaburras
The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water
Death at a Great Distance
The Notebook
Praise
Looking for Snakes
Fish Bones
The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond
Everything
Nature
Snake
The Ponds
The Summer Day
Serengeti
The Terns
Roses, Late Summer
Herons in Winter in the Frozen Marsh
Looking at a Book of van Gogh’s Paintings, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
Foxes in Winter
How Turtles Come to Spend the Winter in the Aquarium, Then Are Flown South and Released Back Into the Sea
Crows
Maybe
Finches
White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher