West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems
In lines pulled taut by the tension between the silent beauty of nature and the poet's longing for  words, Mary Oliver has again provided readers with plenty to think about. Consider "Stars":  "How can I hope to be friends / with the hard white stars / whose flaring and hissing are not speech /  but a pure radiance? / How can I hope to be friends / with the yawning spaces between them / where  nothing, ever, is spoken?"  Yet Oliver does strike up a kind of friendship between nature's  inexpressible beauty and the necessity and solace of language. She writes vividly of each, noting the way   "the sunlight and shadows are chasing each other," (from "The Dog Has Run Off  Again"), in one instance, while elsewhere describing the excitement of writing poems: "little  curls little shafts / of letters words / little flames leaping" (from "Forty Years"). Oliver is  one of the most honored poets now writing in the English language, and, along with Wendell Berry, Gary  Snyder, and A.R. Ammons, an important part of the revival we are seeing in contemporary pastoral poetry.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.