In her fourth volume of poetry, Twelve Moons, Pulitzer Prize-winning Mary Oliver continues to explore the alluring, yet well-nigh inaccessible kingdoms of nature and human relationships, and man's profound, persistent desire for a joyous union with them. these vibrant, magical poems pulse with an aching awareness of nature's unaffected beauty. Her absorbing intimate vision leads us into the natural and human kingdoms we only fleetingly grasp.

The fifty poems in "American Primitive" make up a body of luminous unity. Mary Oliver's visionary poems enunciate the renewals of nature and the renewals of humanity in love, in oneness with the natural, in union with the things of this world. Lyrical and elegiac, Mary Oliver celebrates the primitiave things of America - the wilderness that survives both within our bodies and outside - in ."..the cords/ of my body stretching/ and singing in the/ heaven of appetite."

An introduction to the sound, rhyme, meter, and scansion of metrical poetry with examples from the Elizabethan Age to Elizabeth Bishop.