These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The gift of Oliver's poetry is that she communicates the beauty she finds in the world and makes it unforgettable.

I love how the first two lines are almost like a frame-narrative, a gateway into the poem where you have to accept that as the viewer you can step into a painting and engage with it, relate to it, learn from it. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from The Art Institute of Boston (1998), Dartmouth College (2007) and Tufts University (2008).Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Born in a small town in Ohio, Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28; No Voyage and Other Poems, originally printed in the UK by Dent Press, was reissued in the United States in 1965 by Houghton Mifflin. The horses are the ones to approach Oliver and I think it's key that she says she is 'commingling' with them.

Blue Horses asks what it truly means to belong to this world and to live in it attuned to all its changes. Being Christian myself, I do like this idea, but I can also imagine that for non-religious readers that perhaps doesn't strike entirely true. From 1995, for five years, she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College. At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Whether considering a bird’s nest, the seeming patience of oak trees or the paintings of Franz Marc, Mary Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.For more than forty years, Cook and Oliver made their home together, largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook's death in 2005. Mary Oliver teaches us the profound act of paying attention - a living wonder that makes it possible to appreciate all the others. Below is the 1911 painting by Franz Marc (1880-1916), known originally as Die grossen blauen Pferde, or The Great Blue Horses,, which inspired Oliver's poem. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. She explains what I am looking for, what I am finding in her poetry, in the aptly named “What We Want” it is “something inexplicable made plain.

In a world where young people die too soon with a bullet in the head, in which this occurs not just once but countless of times, what could there horses possibly do except be beautiful and themselves? Whether considering a bird's nest, the seeming patience of oak trees or the paintings of Franz Marc, Mary Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.For those who want more, who want the horses to mean something more clear or more defined, Oliver asks what you could possible expect. Born in a small town in Ohio, Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of twenty-three. Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light; the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems; a Lannan Foundation Literary Award; and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence.