Twelve Moons

Twelve Moons is Mary Oliver's fourth book of poems, published by Little, Brown in 1979, four years before American Primitive won her the Pulitzer.

The territory is already settled. She is writing about the natural world and about human relationships as two kingdoms that can be approached but never quite entered, and about the persistent, slightly hopeless human wish to be joined to them anyway.

What distinguishes the early work is how much darker and stranger it is willing to be. There is less consolation here than readers who come to her through the later books expect, and the poems are more willing to sit inside longing without resolving it.

Seventy-seven pages. Worth reading if the later Oliver has started to feel too settled: this is the same attention before it found its comfortable form.