Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

“Joy is not made to be a crumb,” writes Mary Oliver, and certainly it abounds in her most recent book of poetry and prose poems. Her twentieth volume, Swan shows us that, though we may be “made out of the dust of stars,” we are of the world she captures here so vividly: the acorn that hides within it an entire tree, the wings of the swan like the stretching light of the river, the frogs singing in the muddy shallows.

As the Los Angeles Times noted recently, so many readers “go to her for solace, regeneration and inspiration” that it is not surprising Vice President Joe Biden chose to read one of her poems during the 9/11 remembrance at Ground Zero last September. Few poets express the immense complexities of human experience as skillfully as Mary Oliver, or capture so memorably the smallest nuances, speaking, for example, of stones, “the little ones you can / hold in your hands, their heartbeats / so secret, so hidden it may take years / before, finally, you hear them.” No wonder Oliver ranks, according to the Weekly Standard, “among the finest poets the English language has ever produced.”