Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

Winter Hours collects essays, prose poems and poems by Mary Oliver, published in 1999. It is the most personal of her books: alongside the close attention to the natural world that runs through all her work, she writes directly about her reading and her craft.

The essays consider Edgar Allan Poe, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, and turn as readily to the turtles, owls, ponds and shorelines of Provincetown, where she lived for decades. She describes the discipline of her own writing life, the small hut she built, and the practice of walking out early with a notebook.

A quiet, essayistic companion to the poems, Winter Hours is where Oliver explains, as far as she ever chose to, what she was doing and why.