[.ca] West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems (ISBN 0395850851)

From Amazon.com:
In lines pulled taut by the tension between the silent beauty of nature and the poet's longing for words, Mary Oliver has again provided readers with plenty to think about. Consider "Stars": "How can I hope to be friends / with the hard white stars / whose flaring and hissing are not speech / but a pure radiance? / How can I hope to be friends / with the yawning spaces between them / where nothing, ever, is spoken?" Yet Oliver does strike up a kind of friendship between nature's inexpressible beauty and the necessity and solace of language. She writes vividly of each, noting the way "the sunlight and shadows are chasing each other," (from "The Dog Has Run Off Again"), in one instance, while elsewhere describing the excitement of writing poems: "little curls little shafts / of letters words / little flames leaping" (from "Forty Years"). Oliver is one of the most honored poets now writing in the English language, and, along with Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and A.R. Ammons, an important part of the revival we are seeing in contemporary pastoral poetry.

One of my favorite poets:
I have been waiting so long for new poems from Mary Oliver...and it was worth the wait. These are just as beautiful as the poems in White Pine, Twelve Moons, etc. I especially prize the way Oliver finds lessons about love and life from her observations of nature. Check it out, you won't be disappointed

Mary Oliver is a spiritual teacher as well as a poet.:
I have treasured Mary Oliver's poetry for a number of years. This new collection, West Wind, is both a departure and a development from her earlier work. Nature is her muse, and she still uses nature's events as metaphors for spiritual awareness and growth - what's new is looser, more varied poetic forms and a playfulness coupled with "death" as a recurring theme. Mary, at 60-plus, is facing mortality. As a reader, she can take me anywhere and I'm more than willing to go - even into death. She is not only my favorite poet, but my most important spiritual teacher as well. This book has a place in everyone's poetry and/or dharma collection.