Dog Songs: Poems

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Dog Songs includes visits with old friends, like Oliver’s most beloved dog Percy, and introduces still others in poems of love and laughter, heartbreak and grief. In Dog Songs, Mary Oliver celebrates the special bond between human and dog, as understood through her connection to the dogs who across the years accompanied her on her daily walks, warmed her home and inspired her work. One of her most poignant meditations strokes the heart of why dogs are so much more than the ornament Virginia Woolf’s nephew reduced them to. The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation.

com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books.There is a common, calm refrain: to reach an animal, we must "get rid of fret" (as Lessing remarkably put it.

As in all of her poetry, Oliver patiently shows us how to slow, observe, withdraw, and speak the language of the senses. People who have not only forged our world with curiosity and compassion but also plunged deeply into themselves. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

So I climb on the bed where the light of the moon is shining on your face and I know it will be morning soon. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepy and I wake and am afraid, though I don’t know why. But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit.

Mary Oliver is not only one of the sagest and most beloved poets of our time, a recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, but is also among literary history’s greatest pet-lovers. There are wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change.The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath.