Dog Songs

'The popularity of [Dog Songs] feels as inevitable and welcome as a wagging tail upon homecoming' Boston GlobeIn Dog Songs, Mary Oliver celebrates the special bond between human and dog, as understood through her connection to the dogs who across the years accompanied her on her daily walks, warmed her home and inspired her work. The poems in Dog Songs begin in the small everyday moments familiar to all dog lovers and become, through her extraordinary vision, meditations on the world and our place in it.Dog Songs includes visits with old friends, like Oliver's most beloved dog Percy, and introduces still others in poems of love and laughter, heartbreak and grief. Throughout, the many dogs of Oliver's life merge as fellow travelers and as guides, uniquely able to open our eyes to the lessons of the moment and the joys of nature and connection.

Dog Songs . . . is a sweet golden retriever of a book that curls up with the reader, Oliver . . . is one of our most adored poets, and a longtime lover of dogs. The popularity of [Dog Songs] feels as inevitable and welcome as a wagging tail upon homecoming, Mary Oliver is a canine lover par excellence. Her combo of woman's best friend and poetry is utterly irresistible, Mary Oliver's Dog Songs is, plainly put, a lovely and accessible book of poems, Dog Songs collects [Oliver's] most soul-stirring poems and short prose celebrating that special human-canine relationship and what it reveals about the meaning of our own lives

Born in a small town in Ohio, Mary Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of twenty-three. Over the course of her long career, she received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Hennington College, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching. Mary Oliver died in January 2019.