In 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. To understand oneself, to notice one another, to create moments of deep engagement with life's unanswerable that is The Examined Life. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward. 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.

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.The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. One of her most poignant meditations strokes the heart of why dogs are so much more than the ornament Virginia Woolf’s nephew reduced them to.

Like Lessing, Oliver listens, reads, hears across language and species, and transports herself to the "still magical first world. TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses. It is not the least reason why we should honour as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born.Trivial bump to fore edge, else a fine, crisp copy, in near-fine dust jacket, unclipped, small crease to front flap, bright and sharp.

Complement it with The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs, one of the best art books of 2012, John Homans’s impossibly moving What’s a Dog For? 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. Songs are melodies that capture the dancing, vibrant, binding love that animals pull from us and give to us. Accompany Dog Songs with the science on how pets make us human, Steinbeck's late-in-life journey in the company of his dog Charley ("He cannot read, cannot drive a car but in his field he has no peer!But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepy and I wake and am afraid, though I don’t know why. We own dogs as far as we beg them not to run away, a supplication they might listen to or not, "depending on a million things. In her emotionally eloquent poetry collection Dog Songs, Mary Oliver brings the sheer gentleness and genius of her craft all over again.