Contemporary best-sellers this week

On this week’s contemporary best sellers list Mary Oliver bookends the top five with A Thousand Mornings at the top position and Swan coming in at #5. Louise Glück’s Poems 1962-2012 moves from #7 up to #2. David Ferry, winner of this year’s National Book Award, enters the top five at #3 with Bewilderment, while Billy Collins hangs in at #4 with Horoscopes for the Dead. Only one title makes its debut this week, Melinda Palacio with How Fire is a Story, Waiting. From the publisher: “Melinda Palacio's newest poetry collection creates images that are at once heartbreaking and humorous. She tackles elemental subjects of family and childhood with the same depth and grace as that of myth making and death. As the only child of a mother who died too young, she infuses her words with longing and life, and celebrates the women who came before her. Each poem offers up the truth in a fearless and unsentimental voice.” Over on the anthology best sellers list Billy Collins’s Bring Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds enters the list at #4. This delightful anthology pairs poets with their winged muses: “Poet and bird pairings include: Wallace Stevens and the Blackbird; Emily Dickinson and the Robin; Marianne Moore and the Frigate Pelican; Thomas Hardy and the Goldfinch; Sylvia Plath and the Pheasant; John Updike and the Seagull; Walt Whitman and the Eagle; Billy Collins and the Sparrow.” Finally, in time for the holiday season is Margaret Tarrant’s Christmas Garland debuting at #9.