Mary Oliver

Swan Poems and Prose Poems Mary Oliver Beacon Press: 96 pp., $23 "What can I say that I have not said before?" the poet Mary Oliver wonders on page 1 of this, her 20th collection. "So I'll say it again./The leaf has a song in it. " She is a little weary, at 75. She is still in mourning after the death of her beloved, photographer Molly Cook. And she is not melting fast enough into the ease of animals. Try as she might to be alone, to be "motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned," she is called back into the world.

Swan Poems and Prose Poems Mary Oliver Beacon Press: 96 pp., $23 "What can I say that I have not said before?" the poet Mary Oliver wonders on page 1 of this, her 20th collection. "So I'll say it again./The leaf has a song in it. " She is a little weary, at 75. She is still in mourning after the death of her beloved, photographer Molly Cook. And she is not melting fast enough into the ease of animals. Try as she might to be alone, to be "motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned," she is called back into the world.

The trees have become suddenly very happy it is the rain it is the quick white summer rain the trees are in motion under it they are swinging back and forth they are tossing the heavy blossoms of their heads they are twisting their shoulders even their feet chained to the ground feel good thin and gleaming nobody can prove it but any fool can feel it they are full of electricity now and the shine isn't just pennies it pours out from the deepest den oh pretty trees patient deep-planted may you

Widely acclaimed and oft-celebrated poet Mary Oliver , a recipient of the National Book Award, Lannan Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for 1984's "American Primitive," will visit UCLA Live to regale Angelenos with her passionate, embodied observances of the natural world -- a rare public appearance for the prolific, media-shy New Englander. Royce Hall at UCLA, 340 Royce Drive, L.A. 8 p.m. Friday. $24-$48. (310) 825-2101. www.uclalive.org.

And the speck of my heart, in my shed of flesh and bone, began to sing out, the way the sun would sing if the sun could sing, if light had a mouth and a tongue, if the sky had a throat, if god wasn't just an idea but shoulders and a spine, gathered from everywhere, even the most distant planets, blazing up. Where am I? Even the rough words come back to me now, quick as thistles. Who made your tyrant's body, your thirst, your delving, your gladness? Oh tiger, oh bone-breaker, oh tree on fire!

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox; when death comes, like an iceberg between shoulder blades, I want to step through the door of curiosity, wondering; what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

In the opening poem of "Dream Work," Mary Oliver writes of small fish escaping a "hopeless future": "And probably,/if they don't waste time/looking for an easier world,/they can do it." This sets the tone for a book of poetry that takes on the least-easy world and succeeds in affirming it: the labor of a human being to understand both the wonder and the pain of nature.

USED to be, if you telephoned the poet Mary Oliver, her partner Molly Cook would invariably answer. She'd ask you to hold on a moment, feign footsteps and return to the phone as Oliver, making no pretense at a different voice (editors across the country routinely played along). Cook was, for many years, Oliver's agent. Oliver, everyone understood, was a bit of a recluse. She needed nature and solitude to create her poems. "Writers must . . .

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened? From "New and Selected Poems" by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press: 256 pp., $20)

BLUE PASTURES by Mary Oliver. (Harcourt Brace & Company: $21, 122 pp.) "If I have a meeting with you at three o'clock," writes Mary Oliver in a chapter on the flow of work, the work life of the writer, "rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all." "The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work . . . and gave to it nether power nor time." Oliver has, grace a dieu, given hers both.

USED to be, if you telephoned the poet Mary Oliver, her partner Molly Cook would invariably answer. She'd ask you to hold on a moment, feign footsteps and return to the phone as Oliver, making no pretense at a different voice (editors across the country routinely played along). Cook was, for many years, Oliver's agent. Oliver, everyone understood, was a bit of a recluse. She needed nature and solitude to create her poems. "Writers must . . .

THE West Bank and the Gaza Strip are like a potent drug. One visit and you're hooked, and Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg have the craving. Their book, "The Road to Martyrs' Square," is a strange, seductive hybrid of sociology and memoir that recounts the eight years they spent photographing and studying Palestinian graffiti. If you've never been to the Palestinian territories, this might sound like an esoteric or trivial subject. Studying wall scribblings while there's a war going on?

Long Life: Essays and Other Writings Mary Oliver Da Capo Press: 102 pp., $22 Reading a writer over decades makes true discovery possible. Fans of poet-essayist Mary Oliver have had many chances to see what inspires her unique and powerful insight: nature, small and large. In this collection, we also hear the voices that inhabit her -- Hawthorne, Wordsworth, Poe and especially Emerson.

The trees have become suddenly very happy it is the rain it is the quick white summer rain the trees are in motion under it they are swinging back and forth they are tossing the heavy blossoms of their heads they are twisting their shoulders even their feet chained to the ground feel good thin and gleaming nobody can prove it but any fool can feel it they are full of electricity now and the shine isn't just pennies it pours out from the deepest den oh pretty trees patient deep-planted may you

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened? From "New and Selected Poems" by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press: 256 pp., $20)

Establishing an alibi for her accused sister, Mary Oliver told a jury Monday that Diana Haun was sunbathing on a Ventura beach and bicycling in Camarillo on the day Sherri Dally was abducted from a Target parking lot. Oliver testified that her younger sister told her that on May 6, 1996, she ate breakfast at a fast-food restaurant and then rode her bicycle to Ventura Harbor, where she lounged on the beach until nearly noon.

by MARY OLIVER Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl? Who has it, and who doesn't? I keep looking around me. The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus. The swan opens her white wings slowly. In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness. One question leads to another. Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg? Like the eye of a hummingbird? Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?

Loved your article on "Having It All." I want to inform you of a retirement condominium complex for the active adult, the Champagne Village mobile-home village in Escondido. A few who really have never "understood" mobile-home living have never seen the luxurious mobile homes that afford low maintenance and land ownership. My home and land was originally $164,000 (2,100 square feet) is now at an estimated value of $230,000 in three years. But the real story is about the resort amenities and the special people who live here, where the No. 1 activity is dancing to Big Band music, No. 2, golf and No. 3, tennis, with 90 members.

And the speck of my heart, in my shed of flesh and bone, began to sing out, the way the sun would sing if the sun could sing, if light had a mouth and a tongue, if the sky had a throat, if god wasn't just an idea but shoulders and a spine, gathered from everywhere, even the most distant planets, blazing up. Where am I? Even the rough words come back to me now, quick as thistles. Who made your tyrant's body, your thirst, your delving, your gladness? Oh tiger, oh bone-breaker, oh tree on fire!