Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays

Owls and Other Fantasies gathers Mary Oliver's writing about birds, published by Beacon Press in 2003.

Twenty-six poems, ten of them not collected anywhere before, on the birds that had been part of her life for decades: hawks, hummingbirds, herons, kingfishers, catbirds, crows, swans, swallows, the snowy owl.

Two essays sit alongside them. "Owls" had been picked for the Best American Essays series, and it is the strongest thing in the book: an unflinching account of the great horned owl as a killer, and of standing in a field at dusk half hoping to see one. "Bird", written for this volume, is about nursing an injured gull.

Eighty-eight pages, illustrated with Audubon plates. It works as a self-contained gift book and also, for anyone who has assumed her nature writing is all consolation, as a corrective.