American Primitive

American Primitive is Mary Oliver's fifth collection, published in 1983, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the following year.

Fifty poems, most of them set outdoors and most of them physical: blackberries eaten off the bush, a bear in the woods, ponds, swamps, the moment when watching an animal stops feeling like watching and starts feeling like recognition. Oliver is interested in appetite here as much as in beauty, and the poems are far less genteel than her reputation suggests.

It is the collection that carries In Blackwater Woods, with its instruction about loving what is mortal and letting it go when the time comes, which is probably the single most quoted passage she wrote.

This is the book that made her, and forty years on it is still the one to hand somebody who says they do not read poetry.