Blue Pastures collects fifteen prose works from Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning poet Mary Oliver. "This transcendent collection is Oliver's joyful sharing of her love of her craft."— Library Journal With consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned fifteen luminous prose pieces: on nature, writing, and herself and those around her. She praises Whitman, denounces cuteness, notes where to find the extraordinary, and extols solitude. Nature speaks to her and she speaks to nature. "This book is biased, opinionated; also it is also joyful, and probably there is despair here too...But the reader will find the pleasures more certain, and more constant, than the rills of despond. Thus it has turned out in my life thus far, influenced by the sustaining passions: love of the wild world, love of literature, love for and from another person." –Mary Oliver