Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

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Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.” I’d like to believe she achieved this and if her poetry is any testament to a life lived, then it was a life well lived. If you haven’t read Mary Oliver before, definitely do so as soon as possible. Even those who don’t usually read poetry tend to love her. Mary Oliver achieved great popularity but also great depth of heart and will live on as one of the greats of our time. I began my time with these poems while in the high hills, in a sunny meadow brimming with daisies and birdsong and surrounded by deodars stretching out to meet the sky—so you see how I felt these verses, completely entangled in the way in which Mary Oliver wrote, her unsophisticated but ecstatic dispensing of hope like a clear and sweet stream set never to run out. Oliver won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her work. Below, we select and introduce ten of Mary Oliver’s best poems, and offer some reasons why she continues to speak to us about nature and about ourselves. You can buy much of her best work in the magnificent volume of her selected poems, Devotions. I'm also going to look for a location called Truro. Apparently it was wild enough, a few decades ago, that people who said they saw a bear were almost believed. Now, it must be in the East somewhere, because in the West bears are relatively common 'pests.'

words bestow a brave dogma of openness with the universe, the perils of existence, and the undefinable devotions shared between one another: It's as if the poet herself has sidled beside the reader and pointed us to the poems she considers most worthy of deep consideration." -- Chicago TribuneOliver's body of work amounts to an instruction manual for how to love the world. For her, that story began with a walk in the woods. Oliver tells us that no matter how lonely we get, the whole world is available to our imagination. What makes us human, aside from the ability to feel love and despair, is our imaginative capability, and this human quality can enable us to forge links with the rest of nature and find a place within the ‘family of things’.

Newbies not interested in this whole big book might do well to start with Dog Songs. The charm of the subject of dogs & of the poems, and the mutual devotion (yes) between Oliver and her canine companions touches me, despite that I've never had a desire to own a dog. Beginning with a string of similes to describe the threatening and fearsome idea of approaching death, this poem develops into a plea for curiosity in the face of death and what might come next. Eternity, Oliver asserts, is a ‘possibility’, but this is a poem more concerned with living a curious life now, in this one guaranteed life we have. Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Devotions is a stunning, definitive and carefully curated collection featuring work from over fifty years of writing – from Oliver’s very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through to her last collection, Felicity, published in 2015. Born in a small town in Ohio, Mary Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28. Over the course of her long career, she received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Bennington College, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching. She died in 2019. For TLC straight to your inbox + life-affirming words I don't share anywhere else, just say the word.I should add that Oliver was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award: She is not entirely unappreciated by the literary powers-that-be (see Franklin’s article in the New Yorker from November, for example). And I do believe there is a time and place for complex, complicated poems; I love unexpected resonances and learning something new. This review update is based on a selection of poems ‘From Blue Horses (2014)'. The eleven poems in this collection expressed the repose and comfort Oliver found in the natural world and quietly invited the reader to share her gratitude. She truly was a poet after the nature lover’s own heart. whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things” In keeping with the American impulse toward self-improvement, the transformation Oliver seeks is both simpler and more explicit. Unlike Rilke, she offers a blueprint for how to go about it. Just pay attention, she says, to the natural world around you—the goldfinches, the swan, the wild geese. They will tell you what you need to know. With a few exceptions, Oliver’s poems don’t end in thunderbolts. Theirs is a gentler form of moral direction.

I cannot give these poems any accolades for their craft or uniqueness. They reminded me of the old Swanson TV dinners in foil trays: uniformly prepared and only requiring heating. Nothing is demanded of the reader; it is there for easy consumption and no more. A poet like Kay Ryan, for example, requires a thinking interaction with her readers. Oliver does not. From A Thousand Mornings (2012) is a meditative ensemble of ten poems whose dominant subject is water, be it the sea or the River Ganges. Other poems contain Oliver’s reflections on the approach of winter and her own Life Story against the infinite cycle in nature’s diurnal ebb and flow. No Voyage, and Other Poems, Dent (New York, NY), 1963, expanded edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1965. What called to me at that reading was a poem from her most recent collection at that time, Thirst: It doesn’t have to be Though her lexis and subjects are deceptively simple, her ideas and overwhelming message are incredibly complex. Such morsels of wisdom may only emerge via scathing self-reflection,Reading a couple of Oliver’s poems each morning is like having a devotion, a communion of sorts with the beauty that resides in the goodness around us. This review will be built up bit by bit at the breakfast table. I also appreciate her idea of meditation, which was lounging under a tree and falling asleep. That it can be refreshing is evident in these lines: It then transpires that the speaker is referring to a specific grasshopper, which is eating sugar out of her hand at that precise moment. Once again, Oliver takes us into particular moments, specific encounters with nature which surprise and arrest us. I am blessed to live on a farm with a hundred-acre woods. To me the house is chaos, but the woods are bliss. I’ve lived here for over 30 years and every time I go to the timber I am filled with gratitude. It’s a spiritual experience. It’s where I worship. and entwine the outer world with our inner worlds, where our place among “the family of things” is ascertained only through the intersection of the physical and cerebral realms. Central to her perspective is the interconnectedness of all things, regardless of their tenuous association. The bulk

Yet I saw my peers quote from “The Summer Day,” which ends, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” Others hedged their remembrances, saying, “I know some of you don’t like her poetry, but she was important to me because…” Let’s conclude this selection of Mary Oliver’s best poems with one of her best-known and best-loved: ‘The Journey’. This is a poem about undertaking the difficult but rewarding journey of saving the one person you can save: yourself. We discuss this poem in more depth here. The shortest poem on this list, running to just four short, accessible lines of verse, ‘The Uses of Sorrow’ once again provides us with a concrete image for an abstract emotion: here, sorrow, rather than joy.Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver, The Summer Day It is easy to see why one might perchance envy a dog’s life – ‘breaking the new snow with wild feet’ and ‘not thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.’