52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
49. New and selected poems, volume two.
Another find on the exemplary bookshelf of Dave Nixon. Relentless wonder and exultation at the holiness, happiness and sanctity of life in the natural world, especially flowers, bees and birds (thrush, lark, heron, owl). Really very powerful poems, hitting over and over the same song, but always just right, like the birds she so admires.
from ‘Circles’:
I am so happy to be alive in this world… seeing what I have seen has filled me.
from ‘What I Have Learned So Far’:
The gospel of light is the crossroads – of indolence, or action.
Be ignited, or be gone.
and finally, ‘Some Things, Say the Wise Ones’:
Some things, say the wise ones who know everything, are not living. I say,
you live your life your way and leave me alone.I have talked with the faint clouds in the sky when they are afraid of being left behind; I have said, Hurry, hurry!
and they have said: thank you, we are hurrying.About cows, and starfish, and roses, there is no argument. They die, after all.
But water is a question, so many living things in it,
but what is it, itself, living or not? Oh, gleaminggenerosity, how can they write you out?
As I think this I am sitting on the sand beside
the harbor. I am holding in my hand
Small pieces of granite, pyrite, schist.
Each one, just now, so thoroughly asleep.
Hey, I got this book for my birthday and it’s really beautiful. She’s a bit Annie Dillard-ish, I think.
stephy. July 28th. 2009. 6:30 am.
i see that comparison, except that Dillard approaches the natural world fully expecting it to kill her. Oliver, maybe, has a more romantic outlook.
jnonfiction. July 28th. 2009. 7:28 am.