A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver

This is how much I love Pulitzer Prize - winning poet Mary Oliver's slender book, A Thousand Mornings. I checked it out of the local library a couple days ago. I began reading it that night and finished it the next evening. Today, I reread it and plan to read it again before I return it. Meantime, I plan to buy my own copy because I hope to read it many more times, again and again -- each time noticing a word, a name, an emotion I had not previously noticed.

I do not tend to love poetry. Too often, I find it hard to understand or simply do not relate to it. I had not read Oliver until this week. Frankly, I had not heard of her until I read a magazine article in Oprah, the magazine, the one I'm not supposed to mention here lest I offend literary snobs. I don't care. Through her magazine, I learned of a great writer and expanded my own reading enjoyment. And who knows, perhaps Oliver's concise but elegant poetry will lead me to give more poets a chance and to enjoy their work as well.

I cannot recall ever crying over a poem. Yet I did just that when I read Oliver's "For I Will Consider My Dog Percy," an elegy to the small, curly, white-haired pet with whom she is pictured at the end of the book. Oliver advises in a note that the poem is a "derivative of Christopher Smart's poem 'For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry."

I also do not remember ever reading a poem about a bird and learning about myself in the process. Yet, again I did so when I read Oliver's "The Mockingbird," in which Oliver speaks of a little "thief of other sounds" who finally settles down and looks around "as though to make sure he's alone; / then he slaps each wing against his breast,/ where his heart is,/ and, copying nothing, begins" the more difficult chore of becoming "his true self." Like the mockingbird, people, I so often put on a show. I smile when I'm sad, I'm polite when I'm angry, I'm quiet when I want to scream.  But then, I am alone with my own "true self,/ which of course was as dark and secret/ as anyone else's."

And one last thing: Read Oliver's poetry aloud, not just in silence. It makes a difference.