What Do We Know

Forty poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver

“Mary Oliver’s poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing,” wrote Stanley Kunitz. For the many admirers of Mary Oliver’s dazzling poetry and luminous vision, as well as for those who may be coming to her work for the first time, What Do We Know will be a revelation. These forty poems-of observing, of searching, of pausing, of astonishment, of giving thanks embrace in every sense the natural world, its unrepeatable moments and its ceaseless cycles. Mary Oliver evokes unforgettable images from one hundred white-sided dolphins on a summer day to bees that have memorized every stalk and leaf in a field even as she reminds us, after Emerson, that “the invisible and imponderable is the sole fact.”