Dog Songs: Poems - Couverture souple

“Mary Oliver is a canine lover par excellence. Her combo of woman’s best friend and poetry is utterly irresistible.”

The Rumpus

“Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs is, plainly put, a lovely and accessible book of poems.”

Time Out

 “Oliver’s capacity for simple ecstasy in response to the natural world remains. The new Dog Songs turns... material about canines into something meaningful.”

Bust Magazine 

 “The set of poems all feature dogs, a species much beloved by the poet; she writes of her canine companions with as much awe and reverence as she does other miraculous beasts and natural phenomena. They read as embodiments of the natural order, comprehending the cycle of life and death in ways no human can.”

Brain Pickings: 

“Dog Songs collects her most soul-stirring poems and short prose celebrating that special human-canine relationship and what it reveals about the meaning of our own lives — a beautiful manifestation of Oliver’s singular sieve for extracting from the particularities of the poetic subject the philosophical universalities of the human condition to illuminate what it means to live a good life, a full life, a life of purpose and presence.”

Bookish, The Houston Chronicle: 

“The collection invites us to linger awhile in the pure happiness Oliver feels toward dogs, most notably, her beloved dog Percy... For Oliver, nature is our teacher and dogs some of the best professors.” 

The Bark

“Renowned for her love of nature, Ms. Oliver writes exquisite, lyrical poems that... remind the reader of how much there is to love in this world. Nowhere is this love more evident than in Oliver’s latest collection, Dog Songs... These poems will make you smile, laugh, cry and nod your head in delighted agreement.”

FIRST TIME PERCY CAME BACK

The first time Percy came back
he was not sailing on a cloud.
He was loping along the sand as though
he had come a great way.
“Percy,” I cried out, and reached to him—
 

those white curls—
but he was unreachable. As music
is present yet you can’t touch it.
“Yes, it’s all different,” he said.
“You’re going to be very surprised.”
But I wasn’t thinking of that. I only
wanted to hold him. “Listen,” he said.
“I miss that too.
And now you’ll be telling stories
 

of my coming back
and they won’t be false, and they won’t be true,
but they’ll be real.”
And. then, as he used to, he said, “Let’s go!”
And we walked down the beach together.