Twelve Moons.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979. First edition. Hardcover. This is a jacketed first edition, first printing of acclaimed American poet Mary Oliver’s fifth published collection of poems. This is not only a significant early collection, but also aesthetically appealing, the binding a charcoal cloth with silver spine print and Oliver’s silver facsimile signature on the front cover, the contents bound with ochre endpapers, the book wrapped in a white dust jacket with silver-gray and black print, a photographic portrait of the artist on the rear face.
Condition is fine in a very good dust jacket. The binding is immaculate – square, clean, and tight with sharp corners and no appreciable wear. The contents are pristine with no previous ownership marks, no spotting, no toning, and an unread feel. The dust jacket is neatly price-clipped at the upper front flap, leaving only most of the "$" sign and the foot of the "7" (of "$7.95") intact, but otherwise complete. There is wear and tiny closed tears along the top edge and light overall soiling, with the flap folds and spine modestly toned. The jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.
Twelve Moons captures Oliver's voice at a moment of emerging mastery, sixteen years after her first published collection, and five years before she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The collection includes "Sleeping in the Forest" and "The Black Snake". In Twelve Moons, “Mary Oliver continues to explore the alluring, yet well-nigh inaccessible kingdoms of nature and human relationships, and man’s profound, persistent desire for a joyous union with them. These vibrant, magical poems pulse with an aching awareness of nature’s unaffected beauty” and “present a startlingly rich physical landscape”.
Mary Oliver (1935-2019) published more than two dozen collections of poetry, spanning 1963-2017, as well as prose works. She ranks among America’s most significant and best-selling poets, “best known for her awe-filled, often hopeful, reflections on and observations of nature.”
Poets who achieve wide accessibility and popularity are often disdainfully assailed for banality or simplicity. Oliver fed this inclination of critics, writing blank verse in a conversational style, and liking to present herself as “the kind of old-fashioned poet who walks in the woods most days, accompanied by dog and notepad.” This, coupled with her non-denominational reverence, certainly led to a more than generous share of faint praise and snarky deprecation by a certain set of clean-handed, leather-soled, urbanely urban literary critics. One does not imagine such critics capable of appreciating, let alone heeding, Oliver’s decidedly unsimple yet exquisitely brief, three-part, seven-word "Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
Oliver’s trenchant accessibility belies an unequivocal command of her craft; among her prose works are two excellent manuals for writing poetry. But there is far more to commend her than the ease with which she wore her poetic erudition.
Like other gifted poets who used nature as a “springboard to the sacred,” Oliver’s apparent simplicity is deceptively rich, threaded with “the push and pull of the sinister and the sublime.” As a child, Oliver escaped an awful home life to the woods with Whitman in her backpack. As a mature poet, Oliver does not escape, but rather “picks her way through the violence and the despair of human existence to something close to a state of grace.” This is no saccharine validation; in Oliver’s poems, “consolation comes from the knowledge that the world goes on, that one’s despair is only the smallest part of it”.
Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for her collection American Primitive, and the National Book Award for Poetry in 1992 for New and Selected Poems. Her work also earned her the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize, as well as their Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. She was also awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Reference: Ruth Franklin, “What Mary Oliver’s Critics Don’t Understand”. Item #007929
Price: $850.00