Sunday Salon ~ books and life

Owls and Other Fantasies ~ by Mary Oliver, 2003, poems and essays, 92 pages

A perfect introduction to Mary Oliver’s poetry, this stunning collection features 26 nature poems and prose writings about the birds that played such an important role in the Pulitzer Prize winner’s life.  

 

Within these pages you will find hawks, hummingbirds, and herons; kingfishers, catbirds, and crows; swans, swallows and, of course, the snowy owl, among a dozen others — including ten poems that have never before been collected.  She adds two beautifully crafted essays, “Owls,” selected for the Best American Essays series, and “Bird,” a new essay that will surely take its place among the classics of the genre.

In the words of the poet Stanley Kunitz, “Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing.  Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations.”

For anyone who values poetry and essays and for anyone who cares about birds, Owls and Other Fantasies will be a treasured gift.  For those who love both, it will be essential reading.

This also counts as a Nonfiction November selection.  Oh, and I can also claim it as library loot.

I'm still reading The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), and my friend Fay's copy arrived by mail earlier than expected.  She and I plan to discuss it one of these days soon.

When I took the Crown Center bus on the grocery store trip this week, I chanced upon a new (to me) chewy granola bar:  fudge-dipped coconut.

This photo shows a 2-ounce size, but what I bought were 1-ounce bars.  I ate one shortly after I got home, and it was delicious.  😄  I used to call Donna a choco-holic, so I'm pretty sure she would have loved one of these.

Here's a 2019 photo of a blooming tree near the old gazebo at the Crown Center where I live.  I found it while searching for something else on my blog.  This whole area and the greenhouse you can see beyond the gazebo are no longer there, since that's where our new building is currently being constructed.

In the background is the Crown Center building that will remain when people from my building are moved into the new one being built where you see the grass and the gazebo and the pink tree again.  It looks like I took these photos on the same day, but they were taken two years apart.  This one is from 2017.

Bloggers gather in the Sunday Salon — at separate computers in different time

zones — to share what we have been reading and doing during the week.  

Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.