Devotions

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Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. Oliver continued her celebration of the natural world in her next collections, including Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004 ), and Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (2010). Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman. “Oliver’s poetry,” wrote Poetry magazine contributor Richard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling.” This review is on selected poems from two collections published in 2008: The Truro Bear and Other Adventures and Red Birds. The poems contained her thoughts on two subjects: nature (the heron, the fish, the gray fox, the meadowlark, the panther, the pond, etc.) and self (ambition and dying). It amazes me how the most ordinary things can summon up contemplation that gives us pause. acceptance of one’s darkness, and the will to strive for unflinching compassion above all else. Her

It has been six months since I last read Mary Oliver’s poems. This past week as the weight of work bore down on me, I sought refuge in her verse, and read a couple each evening. 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 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…”There is a thoughtful poem titled Storage on the joy of uncluttering. Below is a fitting response to ‘things’:

note again that GR won't hold spacing, and most poetry is shaped by indented lines, so bear in mind that my samples are not quite accurate) In It Was Early Oliver woke with the dawn to look at the world – the owl under the pines, the mink with his bushy tail, the soft-eared mice, the pines heavy with cones – and was astounded by the many gifts that greeted her, which prompted this thought:Publishers Weekly, May 4, 1990, p. 62; August 10, 1992, p. 58; June 6, 1994, review of A Poetry Handbook, p. 62; October 31, 1994, review of White Pine, p. 54; August 7, 1995, review of Blue Pastures, p. 457; June 30, 1997, review of West Wind, p. 73; March 29, 1999, review of Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems, p. 100; August 28, 2000, review of The Leaf and the Cloud, p. 79; July 21, 2003, review of Owls and Other Fantasies, p. 188. Imagine... I have heard the name Tecumseh before but never knew who he was... now, because of a poem, I'm going to go learn some history. In the poem, Evidence, Oliver reflected that memory can either be 'a golden bowl, or a basement without light'

A collection of poems to dip in and out of, as the spirit moves. Much of the natural world Oliver describes is unfamiliar to me: it was often difficult to see what she was seeing. But feel what she was feeling? Emphatically yes. Oliver's poems succeed beautifully in conveying what it felt like to see what she saw. 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 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. I don’t remember ever encountering Mary Oliver in a creative writing classroom; I do, however, recall reading her poetry in a Catholic spirituality group formed by women from several generations, all 20 of us eager to talk about faith.It has been a month since I last read from this devotional of poems. It is good to hear Mary Oliver’s voice again. It is always refreshing to see the world through her eyes.

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 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. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980.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.’ The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms was also evident in New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award . The volume contains poems from eight of Oliver’s previous volumes as well as previously unpublished, newer work. Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, noticed that Oliver’s earliest poems were almost always oriented toward nature, but they seldom examined the self and were almost never personal. In contrast, Oliver appeared constantly in her later works. But as Reynolds noted “this self-consciousness is a rich and graceful addition.” Just as the contributor for Publishers Weekly called particular attention to the pervasive tone of amazement with regard to things seen in Oliver’s work, Reynolds found Oliver’s writings to have a “Blake-eyed revelatory quality.” Oliver summed up her desire for amazement in her poem “When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems:“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”