Dream Work

Dream Work is a collection of forty-five poems by Mary Oliver, published in 1986. It follows American Primitive, the book that won her a Pulitzer.

The natural world still fills the pages: dogfish, geese, marsh hawks. But the poet's attention has moved inward, to what she called the solitary and difficult labors of the spirit. That means being honest about one's own life, prizing what succeeded and moving beyond what failed.

The poems are more personal than those in the previous book, and harder. Failure, family and the passage of time come up again and again, and Oliver addresses them head on, with little softening.

The collection also contains Wild Geese, a poem that opens by telling the reader they do not have to be good. It has since travelled far beyond the book, appearing on walls and at funerals. Here it sits among poems that earn their consolation instead of taking it for granted.