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

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807095393
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	03/28/2012
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	1,000,721
File size:	445 KB

About the Author

Mary Oliver (1935–2019), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, is one of the most celebrated and best-selling poets in America. She wrote over 30 volumes of poetry and prose, including Blue Iris, Owls and Other Fantasies, Why I Wake Early, two volumes of New and Selected Poems, and Devotions, as well as two essay collections, Long Life and Upstream.

Read an Excerpt

Some Questions You Might Ask

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

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