New and Selected Poems, Volume Two, signed by Mary Oliver.
Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. First edition, second printing. Hardcover. This is a signed copy of the first edition, second printing of the second volume of Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems. Oliver signed “Mary Oliver.” in black ink just above her printed name on the title page. Condition is near fine in a near fine dust jacket. The book is handsome for a trade publication, featuring tan cloth spine over brown cloth boards, the contents, printed on acid-free paper, bound with brown and white head and foot bands and fine endpapers. The binding is square, clean, bright, and tight with sharp corners. We note only some wrinkling at the spine ends. The contents are immaculately clean, with no spotting, soiling, age-toning, or previous ownership marks. The dust jacket is unclipped, retaining the original “$24.95” upper front flap price, clean and bright, and complete, with no loss or tears. Only the spine head shows a touch of minor wrinkling and soiling. The dust jacketed is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.
New and Selected Poems, Volume Two features 42 new poems as well as 69 poems selected by Oliver from six of her last eight collections. When it was published, Oliver was already one of the most celebrated and best-selling poets in America and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her preceding, first volume of New and Selected Poems, published in 1992, had won her the National Book Award.
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”.
In addition to the aforementioned awards, Oliver’s work 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 #008952
Price: $500.00