A Thousand Mornings [Hardcover] reviews

A Thousand Mornings [Hardcover]

A Thousand Mornings [Hardcover] Reviews

There is one complaint to be made about A Thousand Mornings: it is far too short -- 80 pages, and many of those pages are blank. However, when the pages are not blank, we are drawn into the world of Mary Oliver, and it is a world from which we do not eagerly depart! The book opens with the wry humor of "I Go Down to the Shore," and moves from there to the Roethkean questionings of "I Happened to Be Standing": "But I thought, of the wren's singing, what could this be if it isn't a prayer?" There are several one-paragraph prose poems of "earth-praise," which will entice those readers who are willing to be enticed. There is a dialogue with a fox, resumed from earlier books, and a nod to Bob Dylan, expanding on one of the book's epigraphs, Dylan's words: "Anything worth thinking about is also worth singing about." Oliver speaks of growth in the midst of devastation in the poem "Hurricane"; and this reader smiled at "Three Things to Remember," even if the poem was too baldly "proverbial." The change of the seasons, summer to autumn, is depicted in "Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness," although to be sure, there is metaphoric darkness: So let us go on, cheerfully enough, this and every crisping day, though the sun be swinging east, and the ponds be cold and black, and the sweets of the year be doomed. The title poem, "A Thousand Mornings," is a prose-poem of a single sentence, but we do not indict the poem for brevity, when it speaks of "mak[ing] its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing..." Centrally placed, and perhaps the central achievement of the book, is the sequence "Hum, Hum" -- ostensibly about a swarm of bees, but probing into the personal life of the narrator: That child was myself, that kept running away to the also running creek, to colt's foot and trilliams, to the effortless prattle of the birds. Section 4 of the poem, a section which bears the title "Of the Father" contains the narrator's revelation of a deep trauma suffered in childhood, a trauma which Oliver describes tersely, undramatically, and devastatingly. The lovely litany in section 6 of "Hum, Hum" would be a compendium of the anodynes to pains suffered by the poet, and also an antidote to any readerly "disappointment." Thomas Merton, we feel, would applaud Oliver's prose-poem "I Have Decided": a brief apologia for the contemplative life. There are poems about William Blake, black snakes, and "the way of the world" -- a carnivorous and (if I may) piscivorous world. There is a poem against "Extending the Airport Runway" and a poem of dismay at the news presented by "The Morning Paper": some readers, even those favorably disposed to Oliver, might fairly describe these protests as routine. But there are apt rewards for the reader willing to find them, from "the thrush singing in the glowing woods" to the sea which "can rise, ebb, froth, like an incoming frenzy of fountains." As noted in the beginning of this review, we might have cause to complain of brevity -- the apothegmatic brevity of some of the poems, or of the modest size of the book as a whole -- but such complaints are out of court when we enter the world of humble, inquisitive, creative Mary Oliver: the spiritual heiress to the great poet-mystics Whitman, Blake, and Roethke -- Mary Oliver, a poet who resembles no one as much as she resembles herself. I recommend this book highly.. this is my A Thousand Mornings [Hardcover] reviews

A Thousand Mornings [Hardcover] Specs

• From Booklist
• Beginning with her first poetry book in 1963, Oliver has chronicled her enthrallment to the living world, especially the land and sea surrounding Provincetown, Massachusetts, and her spiritual evolution. In her newest collection, her compact poems are conversational and teasing, yet their taproots reach deeply into the aquifers of religion, philosophy, and literature. Some read like brief fables, such as when an old fox compares their respective species and tells the poet, "You fuss, we live." A Bob Dylan quote inspires a poem about song, while a mockingbird's mimicry elicits thoughts about authenticity and one's true self. The crucial and moving poem "Hum, Hum" describes a scarring childhood redeemed by the solace of the embracing, living world and the words of poets. Oliver is funny and renegade as she protests cultural vapidity, greed, violence, and environmental decimation and ravishing in her close readings of nature, such as the resplendent "Tides," which surges like the sea. Ultimately, Oliver warns us that "the only ship there is / is the ship we are all on / burning the world as we go." --Donna Seaman
• About the Author
• Born in a small town in Ohio, MARY OLIVER published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of twenty-eight. Over the course of her long career, she has received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She has led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Bennington College, where she held the Catherine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching. Oliver currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
• See all Editorial Reviews

. A Thousand Mornings [Hardcover]

A Thousand Mornings [Hardcover] Best buy

A Thousand Mornings [Hardcover]
. A Thousand Mornings [Hardcover] will.. (Read More)

A Thousand Mornings [Hardcover],

7 out of 10 based on 60 ratings