With consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned fifteen luminous prose pieces: on nature, writing, and herself and those around her. She praises Whitman, denounces cuteness, notes where to find the extraordinary, and extols solitude.

In these beloved essays, she invites readers into a world both sacred and intricate, where the keenest observations reveal a deeper way of living.

• Nature Writing: From the glassy gaze of a great horned owl to the surprising life found in a bluefish's belly, Oliver's eye misses nothing in the wild landscapes of Cape Cod.
• The Creative Process: Discover the fierce discipline and necessary solitude behind a poet's craft, where wrestling with the angel means letting the mustard run out.
• Literary Companions: Walk with her friend Walt Whitman through the woods and learn how the voice of another poet can become a constant, powerful, and amazing guide.
• A Philosophy of Attention: A powerful argument against seeing the world as ?cute,? finding instead a reverent connection to every living thing in all its terror and beauty.

Mary Oliver (1935?2019), one of the most popular and widely honored poets in the U.S., was the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, she received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for American Primitive in 1984. Oliver also received the Shelley Memorial Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award; the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light; the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems; a Lannan Foundation Literary Award; and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence. She lived most of her life in Provincetown, Massachusetts.