Thirst: Poems

Thirst was published by Beacon Press in 2006, and it is the book Mary Oliver wrote after losing Molly Malone Cook, her partner of more than forty years.

Forty-three poems. The grief is not staged as an interruption to the life she wrote about before; it is treated as part of loving, and she works at experiencing it that way rather than at getting past it. Three long poems in the middle of the book test the terms of religious doctrine directly, and this is the collection where she writes about coming to faith for the first time.

It is also the book where Percy arrives. Seven poems are about her dog, and they are as unguarded and unliterary as anything she published, which is exactly why readers who came to her for consolation tend to name this one.

Thirst is the pivot in her work. Everything before it looks outward at the world; from here on the looking has a bereavement inside it.