Mary Oliver was one of America’s best-loved poets. Her luminous poetry celebrates nature and beauty, love and the spirit, silence and wonder, extending the visionary American tradition of Whitman, Emerson, Frost and Emily Dickinson. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she lived for many years on Cape Cod. Her extraordinary poetry is nourished by her intimate knowledge and minute daily observation of the New England coast, its woods and ponds, its birds and animals, plants and trees.
Thirst was the first new collection by Mary Oliver to be published by Bloodaxe in the UK after Wild Geese: Selected Poems (2004). It introduced two new directions in her work. Grappling with grief at the death of her beloved partner of over 40 years, she strives to experience sorrow as a path to spiritual progress, grief as part of loving and not its end. And in Thirst Mary Oliver chronicles for the first time her discovery of faith, without abandoning the love of the physical world that has been a hallmark of her work for four decades. In three of the book’s stunning long poems, she explores the dimensions and tests the parameters of religious doctrine.
'To read Thirst, is to feel gratitude for the simple fact of being alive. This is not surprising, as it is the effect [Oliver's] best work has produced in readers for the past 43 years.' – Angela O'Donnell, America Magazine
