Book Review: Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

 

Winter Hours

by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver passed away in early 2019 but she left us a wealth of writing. One of my all-time favorite poems is her Wild Geese. You can listen to her read it herself here —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_4xmh_WtE

This collection covers a little bit of poetry, some essays, and even a little biography, though she tended not to put herself at the center of her writing.

“…don’t look for a portrait that is chronological, or talks much about my professional life, or opens to public view the important and proper secrets of the heart. Consider what is written rather as parts of a conversation, or a long and slowly arriving letter…”

Nature was her inspiration and her focus, but she also writes about the writing itself.

“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”

And the writers who have interested her. There are fascinating essays here about Poe, Frost, Hopkins, and Whitman. She speaks of Poe’s stories as “full of the hardware of the nightmare” while stories by Kafka and James “take place in an uncomfortably familiar” world. “They are, horribly and unmistakably, descriptions of life as we know it, or could easily know it.”

There is also an essay about how she built a little house, mostly by herself, and mostly from materials she recycled from the town dump.

“Here I found everything I needed, including nails from half-full boxes spilled into the sand. All I lacked – only because I lacked the patience to wait until it came along – was one of the ridge beams; this I bought at the local lumber company and paid cash for; thus the entire house cost me $3.58.

Quirky? Perhaps. Fascinating and meditative, definitely.

“I am one of those who has no trouble imagining the sentient lives of trees, of their leaves in some fashion communicating or of the massy trunks and heavy branches knowing it is I who have come, as I always come, each morning, to walk beneath them, glad to be alive and glad to be there.”

A wonderful book to while away the “winter hours.”