West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

West Wind was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1997 and continues the mixed form Mary Oliver had opened up in White Pine three years earlier.

Forty pieces, nineteen of them previously unpublished, moving between lineated poems and prose poems. The two subjects are nature and love, and the book is interested less in either one on its own than in the way both of them alter over a lifetime while somehow remaining constant.

It is a short book, sixty-odd pages, and unusually direct about desire. The prose poems in particular loosen her, and several of them read almost like a letter.

The title sequence is among the most quoted things she wrote, especially the line about a person who does not know what to do with a boat, and a river, and love.