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.”

 

 

Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

Dust Tracks on a Road

By Zora Neale Hurston

I first fell in love with the writing of Zora Neale Hurston when Their Eyes Were Watching God was chosen for a community read. I put off reading it for a while but when I did, I was deeply engrossed by her story-telling, her beautifully descriptive settings, and her philosophical musings. It was one of the best books I had ever read.

Then our book club decided to read books with “beautiful covers” for the month of March. I was sitting on my bed, doing my Morning Pages journaling and saw this book peeking out at me from my bookshelf. What a beautiful cover, I thought. It’s a shame I never gotten around to reading it. Then I knew my book for the month had found me - Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography by Zora Neale Hurston.

The only problem was that it was a hard copy. I don’t have much time for reading that isn’t on my Kindle while I’m putting my child to bed. But, I looked at the length of the book and the number of chapters. I had three weeks and there were only 16 chapters. Surely I could do this if I just read one chapter a night, right?

Yes, it’s okay to laugh now. No, I haven’t finished the book. In fact, I’m only a few chapters in but it is every bit of the incredible characterization, thoughtful musings, and amazing story-telling that I saw in Their Eyes Were Watching God. I have long had a weakness for autobiographies by writers and this one does not disappoint.

In the first chapter of the book, Hurston talks about Eatonville, Florida, and describes it “at the time of my birth.” However, she was born in Alabama and didn’t move to Eatonville until she was three. That confused me a little. However, since most of us remember little of our lives before the age of 3, I can understand it.

As simple a description as how and why a road was improved between towns is beautifully laid out, the courtship of her parents is a tale indeed, and how she started walking because a sow was after her cornbread is delightful.

Her tales are filled with vivid characters, clearly realized settings, and the philosophical observations shine through.

“Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural. There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.”

I am going to finish the book, I just bought it for my Kindle for all of $2.15. I’ll update this review when I finish it.