Why I Wake Early

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.
--Mary Oliver, from 'Why I Wake Early'

Mary Oliver's classic collection Why I Wake Early embraces the power and grace that are the hallmarks of Oliver's work.

Why I Wake Early offers us unforgettable glimpes of crickets, toads, lilies, black snakes, butterflies and bears; poems of sunlight, of pinewood and ponds, of greeting the morning, watching the deer and, finally, lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who considers the everyday in our lives and the natural world around us and finds a multitude of reasons to marvel.

Archibald MacLeish wrote to Mary Oliver: 'You have indeed entered the kingdom. You have done something better than create your own world: you have discovered the world we all live in and do not see and cannot feel.'

In Why I Wake Early, Mary Oliver reveals, lovingly, what it means to be human and, more simply: why the poet wakes early.