Blue Pastures

Blue Pastures collects fifteen prose works from Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning poet Mary Oliver.

"This transcendent collection is Oliver's joyful sharing of her love of her craft."—Library Journal

With consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned fifteen luminous prose pieces: on nature, writing, and herself and those around her. She praises Whitman, denounces cuteness, notes where to find the extraordinary, and extols solitude. Nature speaks to her and she speaks to nature.

"This book is biased, opinionated; also it is also joyful, and probably there is despair here too...But the reader will find the pleasures more certain, and more constant, than the rills of despond. Thus it has turned out in my life thus far, influenced by the sustaining passions: love of the wild world, love of literature, love for and from another person." –Mary Oliver

"The soliloquies in Blue Pastures—which seems intended as an informal sequel to her writer's manual, A Poetry Handbook—urge her readers to be as quiet as hunters, and to listen for the soft footfalls of art; inspiration, she insists, is rarely found in drawing rooms." - New York Times

"The best part of the book is Oliver's plein-air poetizing, consisting of tidbits almost all jotted down "somewhere out-of-doors'': in her partial observations of nature ("Just at the lacey edge of the sea, a dolphin's skull''), her exhortations ("You must not ever stop being whimsical'') or an evocative list ("Molasses, an orange, fennel seed, anise seed, rye flour, two cakes of yeast''), readers catch the first whiffs of poetry." - Publishers Weekly

"This transcendent collection is Oliver's joyful sharing of her love of her craft." - Library Journal