An intense and joyful observer of the natural world, Oliver is often compared to Whitman and Thoreau. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon. Maxine Kumin calls Oliver "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms" and "an indefatigable guide to the natural world."

At Blackwater Pond

At Blackwater Pond

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?

Mary Oliver

Image of Mary Oliver

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts,

her pockets full of liches and seeds.

I slept as never before,

a stone on the riverbed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts,

and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me,

the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom.

By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

Mary Oliver

Litttle Miss Nora

Here is my sweet grandaughter Nora, looking pretty in her white.