In this volume of 46 poems, Mary Oliver delves even deeper than she has in the past into the mysteries of life, love, and death. Exploring the evidence presented to us daily by the natural world, inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth—”To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”—Oliver offers poems of arresting beauty and insight. Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Oliver’s work in Evidence reflects on the power of love and the great gifts of the natural world.

In “There Are a Lot of Mockingbirds in This Book,” she writes:

but this isn’t nature

   where the sweetest things,

      being hidden in leaves

         and thorn-thick bushes

reveal themselves rarely—

   this is a book

       of the heart’s rapture,

           of hearing and praising…

“The work of Mary Oliver is one of those rare and lovely convergences. She is a lyric artist with a riveted eye and an enormous heart, one of the nation’s great spiritual sentinels.” —Brian Doyle, Christian Century

Mary Oliver, recognized by The New York Times Book Review as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet,” has many titles, recent among them being The Truro Bear and Other Adventures and New & Selected Poems, Volume Two.