Flight Of The Wild Geese

Mary Oliver is one of America's best-loved poets, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her luminous poetry celebrates nature and beauty, love and the spirit, silence and wonder, extending the visionary American tradition of Whitman, Emerson, Frost and Emily Dickinson. Her extraordinary poetry is nourished by her intimate knowledge and minute daily observation of the New England coast, its woods and ponds, its birds and animals, plants and trees.

The flight of the wild geese from the Arctic to the Texas shores of Mexico.

"Flight of the Wild Geese follows the story of the winter wildlife of the Solway Firth, that wonderfully wild estuary set between the rugged hills of Cumbria and the rolling farmland, moors and forests of Dumfries and Galloway." "The author's journey takes him to remote islands, beginning with the two Scottish outliers of North Rona and Sula Sgeir, venturing ever northwards via the stunning rocky coasts of the Faroe Islands, the black-sand volcanics of Jan Mayen, and the great sea bird colonies of Bear Island before encountering pack ice in the vast sea channel of the Storfjorden. In Svalbard's Arctic waters, wildlife fills every space against the backdrop of glistening snowy peaks, and glaciers carving rivers of ice down to the sea. Ivory gulls roam the ice islands searching for food, while seals hunt the open flats between. Here, the author caught his first view of Svalbard - Kingdom of the Ice Bear."--BOOK JACKET.

The genre of poems that may be read both forward and backward, producing different creations was known as the "flight of wild geese." These poems were often sent so that a distant lover, like the migrating birds, would return. Its greatest practitioner, and the focus of this critical anthology, is Su Hui, a woman who, in the 4th Century, embroidered a silk for her distant husband using a grid of 840 characters that created perhaps 12,000 ways to read this poem. With examples from the 3rd to the 19th centuries, Michele Metail describes reversible poems as "a singular adventure at the edge of meaning, of language, and of writing."

Archer, a teacher from the city, has come to the Gare farm to stay while she teaches in the nearby school. As she continues to learn about life in the country, she begins to realize the plight of the family she is staying with. The strict Caleb Gare uses blackmail and punishment to get what he wants, but how secure is his position? When the young Mark Jordan, the son of his wife with another man, arrives, he tries even harder to retain control over the family. With all of his machinations failing around him, Caleb is quickly losing control over his family and consequently, over his farm.

This book was the author’s first novel for which she won the Dodd Mead First Novel Award in 1925.

In range, Wild Geese covers the geese of North America, Europe and Asia, and thus the world species except for the Hawaiian Goose or Ne-Ne. The plan of the book is similar to the author's Ducks of Britain and Europe but distribution, status and migration rightly assume a more extensive role in Wild Geese and the detailed text on those subjects is fully complemented by migration and distribution maps. Comprehensive chapters are also devoted to classification, ecology, breeding, identification, and to exploitation and conservation. The identification chapter is especially helpful with sections on adult and first winter birds, downy young, plumage variants and voice, for each species and sub-species, as well as guidance on ageing and sexing geese in the field. The text is effectively supported by 16 identification plates in colour by Carol Ogilvie, showing details of heads and bills as well as all species in flight and on the ground, and downy young. The author is an established authority on ducks and geese and has been a research scientist at the Wildfowl Trust, Slimbridge, England, since 1960.