Devotions

Product Information

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) 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. I began my time with these poems while in the high hills, in a sunny meadow brimming with daisies and birdsong and surrounded by deodars stretching out to meet the sky—so you see how I felt these verses, completely entangled in the way in which Mary Oliver wrote, her unsophisticated but ecstatic dispensing of hope like a clear and sweet stream set never to run out. 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. of her work fixated on subjects including identity, mortality, and nature, often blending these vital fascinations within the same poem:

Devotions.pdf | DocDroid Devotions.pdf | DocDroid

A timely reminder that we can opt to be softer and kinder when our natural bent is to be just the reverse. I also appreciate her idea of meditation, which was lounging under a tree and falling asleep. That it can be refreshing is evident in these lines:Some of this, the more structured areas of the collection, I liked very much. Others, the more free flowing, stream-of-consciousness selections, didn’t resonate with me at all. For poems so firmly rooted in the physical realm, they tended to feel very ephemeral, which is a writing choice I always have difficulty connecting with. However, there were certain lines that resonated so strongly. While I might not have fallen in love with her style, I can easily see why it speaks so deeply to others.

Poetry / Mary Oliver Poetry / Mary Oliver

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.

Success!

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 Now here's the first verse of a poem the title of which is a spoiler. Please, Ms Oliver, could you not have let us try to "pay attention" and figure out what you were referencing? 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.’ In Tides, Oliver’s keen eye surveyed the sea (‘blue gray green lavender’), old whalebones, white fish spines, barnacle-clad stones, and the ‘piled curvatures’ of seaweeds. There is a pleasing, relaxed contrast to the busyness of the sea pulling away, the gulls walking, seaweeds spilling over themselves. Oliver said,

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

Featured, too, in Red Birds (2008) are Oliver’s thoughts about mortality, this life, amassing things, and chasing our ambitions. The following poems are the ones that stood out for me. There is a constancy or fidelity in nature elegantly communicated in my favorite poem in this collection:

Poetry

I will mention them now, / I will not mention them again,” Oliver writes of her parents, after speaking in sympathetic but oblique terms about her relationship with them (70-71). 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. This poem proves to be a turning point, however, and the poems that follow it, from earlier in Oliver’s career, reveal more personal details about her life. Of course, much has been said of Oliver's work—that it is too simple, or too naïve, or that its cadence derives not from metre but from a sense of harmony that many of us have been too dulled to attempt to feel. The critics can relax: Oliver herself did not want to live forever, only to be remembered if at all; as she says in one of the poems included in this collection; as "a bride married to amazement". And that she was. That we all can feel when we go out seeking the world through her words. From where I stand, Devotions is a wonderful place to start.

Mary Oliver - DocDroid Select Titles Also by Mary Oliver - DocDroid

Devotions provides a fitting culmination of her life philosophy, her core tenets bound together in one vulnerable place. Ultimately, her work divulges with astute observation the crux of what we are: at once human and animal, at once selfish and full of gratitude, at once perfect and profoundly flawed. The paradoxical balancing act between shameless desire and overwhelming selflessness is deftly traversed through her lush turns of phrase: These poems were inspired by what is often unobserved - Queen Anne’s Lace in an 'unworked field' making ‘all the loveliness it can’ or a swan ‘rising into the silvery air, an armful of white blossoms, a perfect commotion of silk and linen.’ They also steer our thoughts toward beneficent ways of approaching the hosts of things that worry us or claim our lives. Most of all, I love reading about how she went about walking in the woods. Growing up in Ohio, Oliver said in one of her rare interviews that she ‘ felt those first important connections, those first experiences being made with the natural world rather than with the social world.’ Perhaps for this reason much of her poetry uses the natural world as the lens through which she peers into the human heart and mind. At 17, Oliver would befriend Norma, the sister to poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and spend most of a decade organizing St. Vincent Millay’s papers while working for her estate. She attended Ohio State University and Vassar College without finishing a degree, but once her first collection of poetry came out her career as a poet was well under way and she would later teach while working as a poet-in residence at several colleges before finishing her career as Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College. Her collections are also highly decorated, winning the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive as well as the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems While at the St. Vincent Millay estate she would meet Molly Malone Cook, who would become her life-long partner as well as agent until Molly passed in 2005. Molly had previously owned a bookstore where she employed a young John Waters before he became a celebrated filmmaker and the couple maintained a friendship with him for the remainder of their lives. Though my favorite anecdote is that, while working as Mary’s agent, whenever a call came in for her, Molly would just pretend to be her on the phone and eventually editors just came to accept her as the same as actually speaking to Mary. 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. 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.

Become a Member

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: 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. There is a thoughtful poem titled Storage on the joy of uncluttering. Below is a fitting response to ‘things’: Death is something that comes ‘out of the dark’ or ‘out of the water.’ It is grotesque given it has ‘the head the size of a cat but muddy and without ears.’ Yet, right in the middle of seven stanzas we read: 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.