Red Bird

Red Bird is Mary Oliver's twelfth collection of poems, published by Beacon Press in 2008, and at sixty-one poems it is the largest single volume of new work she produced.

Written in her seventies, it is a book of gratitude more than of grief, though the grief of Thirst is still in the room. The observation is as close as ever: the birds, the ponds, the weather over Provincetown, and Percy, her thoroughly disobedient dog, who gets several poems to himself.

The new thing here is a cycle of eleven linked love poems, a form she had not attempted before. They are addressed rather than general, and they change the temperature of the book.

Ninety-six pages. It is a good place to go after Thirst, and it shows an eighty-year career still capable of surprising itself.