House of Light.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. First edition, first printing. Hardcover. This is an exceptional copy of the first edition, first printing, near fine in a near fine dust jacket. The blue cloth binding is clean, bright, tight, and square, with sharp corners and bright silver lettering on the spine. We note only a trivial touch of shelf wear to the spine heel. The contents are crisp, bright, and almost immaculately clean, with no previous ownership marks. The only flaw to the contents noted is a hint of barely discernible spotting confined to the otherwise bright and clean text block edges. The dust jacket is unclipped, the original “$14.95” upper front flap price intact, and complete, with no loss or tears, and unfaded, with no fading to the blue spine print or front cover print and illustration. The jacket’s minor flaws are a touch of shelf wear to the flap folds and joints and some faint spotting. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.
House of Light found Oliver at perhaps the height of her powers; the work, which won Oliver the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, was published on the heels of her 1984 Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive and just two years before her National Book Award for New and Selected Poems. The collection contains one of Oliver’s best-regarded and most famous poems, “The Summer Day” with its gently urgent, querying exhortation: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do | with your one wild and precious life?”
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 #008951
Price: $750.00