Book Number Seven: Winter Hours – Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems by Mary Oliver

(Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999)

I was introduced to this book, and to Mary Oliver, by an American friend. Since then I have read a lot of Mary Oliver’s work and every piece has been just beautiful – she is so engaged with nature – so observant – and her prose and poems are simple with a real love at their heart.

I love the varied material in this book. The way we get an insight into the author and her world and how she sees things. We watch as she is unable to clean the stairs of her house because a spider is building its web there, we see turtles travel to the beach to lay their eggs, we are allowed into the secrets of how she came to write her poem ‘The Swan’.

Mary Oliver talks about poems needing to have ‘sincere energy’ and ‘a spiritual purpose’ and I think these are the qualities that I love in her work. Here is gentleness and insight alongside the raw realities of life.

Just beautiful.