Blue Iris: Poems and Essays

Blue Iris collects Mary Oliver's writing about flowers, weeds and trees, published by Beacon Press in 2004 as a companion to Owls and Other Fantasies.

It brings together ten new poems, a couple of dozen she chose from her earlier books, and essays not published anywhere before. The subjects are exactly what a reader would hope: roses, poppies, peonies, lilies, morning glories, the thick-bodied black oak, the fragrant white pine, the tall sunflower, the slender bean.

The argument running under it is that plant life keeps showing us the shape of our own, and that this is a real observation rather than a decorative one. She is unusually good on weeds, and on the fact that a garden is a negotiation rather than a possession.

Like the birds volume, it is short, beautifully made and self-contained, and it is one of the easiest Oliver books to give somebody.