30 Books in 30 Beach Days Day 13: "A Thousand Mornings"
You can breeze through this next book, A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver, in an afternoon at the beach as you gaze out at the sea and notice, perhaps for the first time, the various colors that work in tandem to create the vista before you. This is a beautiful, slim book of poems, and before you dismiss this by saying "I'm not a poetry person," you should know that neither am I! I take issue with much of modern poetry, because I find it too dreary and inaccessible. This volume, however, captured me, and it has a quality reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, the happy mid-century poet who loved babies and the spring.
Oliver writes mostly of nature, of the forests and the flowers and the sea, to which she has easy access at her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The companions in her poems are mostly animals: her dog Percy, a fox with whom she has a clever conversation, the mockingbird whose own song (uncopied) she waits patiently to tease out. Her style is simple, serene, and reverent; she blends a religious quality with her observations of the beauty that surrounds her. In "I Happened to Be Standing," for example, she writes: "Then a wren in the privet began to sing. / He was positively drenched in enthusiasm, / I don’t know why. And yet, why not. / I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe / or whatever you don’t. / That’s your business. / But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be / if it isn’t a prayer? / So I just listened, my pen in the air.
She's consummately human, imbuing her rich descriptions with her own observations, forcing her overzealous mind to slow down and, quite literally, smell the roses. Smell them with her on your next beach trip.
Rating: 5/5
