New and Selected Poems.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. First edition, first printing. Hardcover. This is a first edition, first printing of the work that won Mary Oliver the National Book Award for Poetry in 1992. Condition is very good plus in a very good dust jacket. The binding, featuring green cloth spine over green paper-covered boards, is square, clean, bright, and tight with sharp corners. We note only a little wrinkling to the spine ends. The contents are quite clean, with no spotting and only a barely discernible hint of mild age-toning to the perimeter of the pages and the text block edges. The sole previous ownership mark is considerable, but lovely, apropos, and contemporary to publication; a "September 24, 1992" inked gift inscription on the front free endpaper recto reads: "Larry, I've seen how you are thrilled again and again by such miracles as a tiny heart beating inside of an egg and the presence of someone who loves you. And I know that you will never 'end up simply having visited this world.' I hope that you will always be 'washed and washed / in the river / of earthly delight - '" I love you Diane". The two lines quoted in the inscription are from Oliver's poems "When Death Comes" and "Poppies", both of which were among the new poems first published in this volume (at pp.10-11 and pp.39-40, respectively).
The dust jacket is clean and complete, retaining the original “$20.00” upper front flap price, and with no loss. The green hue remains uniform across the spine and faces, the red spine print is sunned, as usual, but still legible. The jacket shows modest wear and wrinkling to extremities, more noticeable at the spine ends. This jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.
New and Selected Poems features 30 new poems written for the volume in 1991-1992, as well as five poems that had never appeared in any of her books, followed by selections from House of Light (1990), Dream Work (1986), American Primitive (1983), Twelve Moons (1979), The Night Traveler and Sleeping in the Forest (1978), The River Styx, Ohio and Other Poems (1972), and No Voyage and Other Poems (1963 and 1965). New and Selected Poems found Oliver at perhaps the height of her powers; she had won the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive in 1984 and the Christopher Award, L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light in 1990. Winning the 1992 National Book Award for Poetry for this collection placed Oliver in the ranks of other winners, past and future, such as Marianne Moore (1951), Wallace Stevens (1955), Robert Frost (1963), John Ashbery (1976), Lucille Clifton (2000), W. S. Merwin (2005), and Louise Glück (2014).
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 trio of awards, Oliver's work also earned her the American Academy of Arts and Letters 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 #008960
Price: $375.00