Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career.

Poetry / Mary Oliver Poetry / Mary Oliver

Beginning with her first book in 1963, Mary Oliver’s poetry has been a touchstone for understanding our world and ourselves. Apparently it was wild enough, a few decades ago, that people who said they saw a bear were almost believed. Her words capture our finite existence in all its wonders and beauty where even ‘ a box full of darkness’ can be understood ‘ that this, too, was a gift.It was tragic to lose her in 2019, right around the same time another giant of modern US poetry who also excelled at poetry harnessing the natural word, W.

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver Summary Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver Summary

I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned.This collection brought to mind the very little Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson I’ve read in her reverence for nature. Thus, the journey from a greater focus on earthly, interpersonal concerns to the more broadly transcendent experience of existing in nature provides a roadmap for the reader. Over time, as she carefully observes and records, Oliver extols the beauty and complexity around her and reminds us of the interconnectedness of living. They reminded me of the old Swanson TV dinners in foil trays: uniformly prepared and only requiring heating. The poem seems to take place at the time of Oliver’s burying her parents, and as she says in this poem, they do not appear in her work in any of the later poems which are collected earlier in the book.

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - Goodreads Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - Goodreads

I think I understand why people love them so: they're mostly about nature, they're happy, they make one feel good. Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another—why don’t you get going? Unfortunately, I just couldn’t quite connect with her style and voice, even if I found her subject matter beautiful. 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. 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.stands as a quiet meditation on the blameless act of being in a world that is preoccupied with doing.

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - Goodreads

While I might not have fallen in love with her style, I can easily see why it speaks so deeply to others. Born in a small town in Ohio,Mary Oliverpublished her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28. 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. 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.While often quoted without the full poem used as an inspirational message, what I love best about this line is that—in context—Oliver has already answered what she would do and that is to walk in the woods. PRAYING It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak. Featured, too, in Red Birds (2008) are Oliver’s thoughts about mortality, this life, amassing things, and chasing our ambitions.