Roo Borson, Ten Thousand
Image: Van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone

In celebration of Earth Hour, 2008.

Visit Red Star Café for Earth Hour blogging.

Mary Oliver, The Swan

An intense and joyful observer of the natural world, Mary Oliver is often compared to Whitman and Thoreau. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon and humpback whales. Oliver has been called “a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms” and “an indefatigable guide to the natural world.”

Image: Mikhail Vrubel, Swan Princess, 1900. Oil on canvas.