Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems Volume One won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1992. It has become a generous resource—read and returned to many a time—for solo and shared journeys into the wonder of being alive in the natural world. Now this popular volume has been re-issued with a new cover to accompany Mary Oliver’s forthcoming New and Selected Poems Volume 2.

Don’t bother me.

I’ve just

been born.

*

The god of dirt

came up to me many times and said

so many wise and delectable things, I lay

on the grass listening

to his dog voice, crow voice,

frog voice; now,

he said, and now,

and never once mentioned forever,

Stephen Dobyns, in the New York Times Book Review, wrote: “One of the astonishing aspects of [Oliver’s] work is the consistency of tone over this long period. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets… “There is no complaint in Ms Oliver’s poetry, no whining, but neither is there the sense that life is in any way easy… These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer humans beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward.”

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth

remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds. I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths among the branches

of the perfect trees. All night

I heard the small kingdoms breathing

around me, the insects, and the birds

who do their work in the darkness. All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.