Evidence: Poems

Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for...more

Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” Evidence is a collection of forty-seven new poems on all of Mary Oliver’s classic themes. She writes perceptively about grief and mortality, love and nature, and the spiritual sustenance she draws from their gifts. Ever grateful for the bounty that is offered to us daily by the natural world, Oliver is attentive to the mysteries it imparts. The arresting beauty she finds in rivers and stones, willows and field corn, the mockingbird’s “embellishments” or the last hours of darkness permeates her poems. Her newest volume is imbued through and through with that power of nature to, in Oliver’s words, “excite the viewers toward sublime thought.”  Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Oliver is a skilled guide to the rarest and most exquisite insights of the natural world. “After a few hours in her quiet, exuberant presence,” writes Los Angeles Times columnist Susan Salter Reynolds, “one feels as though the raw sunlight in the room, the brightness of the water, the white wood and flashing wings outside the window are bleaching unimportant details from the day.” From one of America’s most loved and respected poets, this new volume plumbs the evidence of our most profound mysteries.      less