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Why I Wake Early

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Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness.

-from 'Why I Wake Early'

Why I Wake Early embraces the power and grace that are the hallmarks of Oliver's work.

The collection offers glimpses of crickets, toads, lilies, black snakes, butterflies and bears; of sunlight, pinewood and ponds. Here are poems greeting the morning, watching the deer and, finally, lingering in happiness - all infused with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who attends to the everyday and the natural world around us and finds a multitude of reasons to marvel.

In Why I Wake Early, Mary Oliver reveals, lovingly, what it means to be human and, more simply: why the poet wakes to greet each new dawn.

Mary Oliver

Born in a small town in Ohio, Mary Oliver (1935-2019) published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, Oliver wrote over thirty volumes she received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She also received the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy an, Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award, and the National Book Award, amongst several others.

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