House of Light

House of Light was published by Beacon Press in 1990, between the two books that made Mary Oliver's reputation.

Forty-six poems, and the mode is the one people mean when they talk about her: ordinary attention pushed until it turns into something else. Ponds, swans, a grasshopper, spring arriving again. She is asking, quite directly, how a person is supposed to love this world knowing what happens to everything in it, and whether it is possible to live as though time were not counting down.

It contains The Summer Day, which ends with the line about what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life. That poem is now quoted so widely that it has almost detached from its author, but the book around it is what gives it its weight: the grasshopper eating sugar out of her hand comes first, and the question only lands because of the looking that preceded it.

It won a Christopher Award and the Boston Globe's Lawrence L. Winship Book Award in 1991.