The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays

The Truro Bear and Other Adventures collects Mary Oliver's writing about animals, published by Beacon Press in 2008. It completes the set begun with Owls and Other Fantasies, on birds, and Blue Iris, on plants.

Ten new poems, thirty-five taken from her earlier books, and two essays. The range is wider than the companion volumes: bears, snakes, spiders, porcupines, humpback whales, hermit crabs, and Percy, her small and thoroughly disobedient dog.

The title poem is about a bear reported around Truro on Cape Cod, an animal that may or may not have been there. That uncertainty is the point, and it is the most interesting thing in the book: she is writing about what we want to be out in the woods as much as about what is.

Eighty pages. Like the other two it is short and self-contained, and it is the one to reach for if the reader in question likes animals more than they like poetry.