Horas de invierno

Mary Oliver, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is one of the most influential voices in contemporary literature. Usually remote and discreet, it comes to the forefront in this unclassifiable and beautiful miscellany in which "everything that appears is true in the most autobiographical sense of the word". They are, therefore, nine essays full of memories and personal experiences, accompanied by a brief selection of poems "written in the middle of nature" and with the self-imposed obligation that they reflect "an existence lived with passion, patience and intelligence". Thus, for example, from the account of those days in which the poet undertook the construction of a cabin that would serve as a mirror and refuge for the soul, even before the body, we move on to the chronicle of her meticulous attention to spiders with which he lives, or the description of that moment, inexplicable and sacred, in which two deer approach him in the forest and lick his hand. And it is that, although the author is in permanent debt with other great poets to whom she also dedicates exquisite pages in this volume -Whitman, Frost, Poe..., those "to whom we turn in search of a refuge against the chaos of our own experience"-, she herself admits that "I could not be a poet without nature, because for me the door to the forest is the door to the temple".