Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

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Oliver herself didn’t have any declared religion; she spoke with Krista Tippett of “On Being” about attending Sunday school as a child but then feeling reluctant to join the church more fully. “I had trouble with the resurrection,” she said. The world seems to spin too fast for us to slow down, but slowing down is just the thing that would help us find our footing.

Poetry can describe many a feeling with astounding accuracy, but there is no describing poetry. Instead, I will attach here one of my favourite pieces from this volume, its very own, very best review: To Begin With, The Sweet Grass Still, her work became more and more spiritual. For example, her latest book, a collection of selected poems, is titled Devotions . The New Yorker’s Ruth Franklin notes that “many poems here would not feel out of place in a religious service, albeit a rather unconventional one.” You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.” ― Mary Oliver, Upstream I wanted to read Oliver beyond her most popular, so I started with Upstream: Selected Essays and A Thousand Mornings.)Here are excerpts from two poems I love. The first is prose-like and too lovely not to reproduce in full. Devotions is a master collection of Mary Oliver’s poetry, collecting bits and pieces from other collections of her work over the course of her career, spanning from 1963 to 2015. This collection brought to mind the very little Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson I’ve read in her reverence for nature. This reverence of the natural world is what bound all of these poems into a more cohesive unit. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver, The Summer Day Poetry, May, 1987, p. 113; September, 1991, p. 342; July, 1993, David Barber, review of New and Selected Poems, p. 233; August, 1995, Richard Tillinghast, review of White Pine, p. 289; August, 1999, Christian Wiman, review of Rules for the Dance, p. 286. 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’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. 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. Dream Work (1986) continues Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature” according to Prado in a later review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Ostriker considered Oliver “among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey.” For Ostriker, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’ ... into the world of historical and personal suffering. ... She confronts as well, steadily,” Ostriker continued, “what she cannot change.”

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” — Mary Oliver, Upstream

The subject of these poems included the slippery green frog, stones on the beach, blueberries, a vulture’s wings, and the gorgeous bluebird. Reading the poems is like going on a nature ramble with her and seeing what we often take for granted with new eyes. I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.” — Mary Oliver Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980. There is a constancy or fidelity in nature elegantly communicated in my favorite poem in this collection: From Dog Songs (2013) is a heartwarming collection of poems that will resonate with readers who love dogs. Oliver wrote with deep affection for her dogs and devoted a handful to Percy ‘our new dog, named for the beloved poet.’Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. In addition to such major awards as the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Oliver received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. 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 Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. ” — Mary Oliver, Mysteries, Yes 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.

While society has grown a little wiser to how the technologies can be exploited by foreign governments and boiler rooms spewing misinformation, the costs of allowing our attention to be commandeered remain drastically understated. It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs. In so much of her work, she uses nature to point to the sacred. Then she verbalizes truths you didn't know you had buried in you. And somehow, she makes you feel more comfortable being human. 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 Tribune What called to me at that reading was a poem from her most recent collection at that time, Thirst: It doesn’t have to beIt 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. For today's daily dose of poetry, beauty, and devotion, here's an incomplete collection of my favorite Mary Oliver quotes for you. Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing — that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.” ― Mary Oliver, House of Light