Devotions

Product Information

Four poems express the thankfulness one feels towards a beloved (a ‘gift’) and the pangs of impending or actual loss. There is a pleasing, relaxed contrast to the busyness of the sea pulling away, the gulls walking, seaweeds spilling over themselves. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - AbeBooks

If you live in the city like I do, I wonder if you have sometimes pined for the woods or a pocket of green where you can be in communion with the natural world. In an extraction of eleven poems from her collection of new poems from 2005, Oliver bade us pay attention to the natural world in every season. This review is on selected poems from two collections published in 2008: The Truro Bear and Other Adventures and Red Birds. 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.It is very nice to have selected poems from books not available as ebooks and those that are out of print: What Do We Know, The Leaf And The Cloud, White Pine, American Primitive, Twelve Moons, The River Styx, Ohio, and No Voyage.

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - Goodreads

Beginning with her first book in 1963, Mary Oliver’s poetry has been a touchstone for understanding our world and ourselves. The poems contained her thoughts on two subjects: nature (the heron, the fish, the gray fox, the meadowlark, the panther, the pond, etc. Born in a small town in Ohio, Mary Oliverpublished her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28.There is a lovely poem titled To Begin With, The Sweet Grass, in which she considered the ’the witchery of living' and bid us to treasure life, to give both ourselves and others a chance, to evolve and be more than ourselves. Mid-way the book, however, the poem “Flare” takes on the subject of Oliver’s difficult relationship with her parents. 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. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver’s work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015.

Devotions, The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver Devotions, The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver

Central to her perspective is the interconnectedness of all things, regardless of their tenuous association. Subjects like these reveal much about the way Oliver sees the world, and can therefore be considered personal poems. Oliver compared her job of putting words on a page to the greater brilliance found in the ‘verbal hilarity’ of a mockingbird or the pure gracefulness of a white heron. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. I’ve been reading Oliver for years and every time I think I’ve exhausted her collections for poems that nearly knock me to the floor I discover another and its like the sky opening up and all of the cosmos raining down into my heart.While I might not have fallen in love with her style, I can easily see why it speaks so deeply to others. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches and power in the world. MARY OLIVER ® is the registered trademark and service mark of NW Orchard LLC in the United States and various foreign countries.

Poetry / Mary Oliver Poetry / Mary Oliver

The poems in the collection are presented with no commentary other than the fact of their selection for the collection. From Dog Songs (2013) is a heartwarming collection of poems that will resonate with readers who love dogs.

As for the volume as a body: Devotions presents a bouquet of Oliver's poems from across her long career in her own arrangement. Featured, too, in Red Birds (2008) are Oliver’s thoughts about mortality, this life, amassing things, and chasing our ambitions. That being said, age changes taste, so perhaps I’ll revisit her in a few years and find that we finally resonate with one another. Born in a small town in Ohio, Mary Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28.