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. 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. 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: A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, Oliver routinely published a new book every year or two. Her main themes continue to be the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the limits of human consciousness and language in articulating such a meeting. Jeanette McNew in Contemporary Literature described “Oliver’s visionary goal,” as “constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully conferred subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition. … At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal ‘a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy / like a shadow.’” Her last books included A Thousand Mornings (2012), Dog Songs (2013), Blue Horses (2014), Felicity (2015), Upstream: Selected Essays (2016), and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017). 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.

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: In fact, I heard Oliver read her poems in a church, though not as part of a service. Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis, the Episcopal cathedral for the diocese of Missouri, decorated in purple tones for Advent, sponsored a poetry reading in December 2007. I remember a feeling of calmness, enhanced by the low lights of the church. Oliver, slight and dark-haired, read slowly and thoughtfully. Many of the poems centered around dogs (her 2013 collection is titled Dog Songs) or scenes from nature in and around Provincetown, Mass., where she lived with her life partner, Molly Malone Cook, for more than five decades..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. 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. What called to me at that reading was a poem from her most recent collection at that time, Thirst: It doesn’t have to be 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. 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.

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.’ 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 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.Also missing is Oliver’s darker work, the poems that don’t allow for consolation. “ Dream Work” (1986), her fifth and possibly her best book, comprises a weird chorus of disembodied voices that might come from nightmares, in poems detailing Oliver’s fear of her father and her memories of the abuse she suffered at his hands. The dramatic tension of that book derives from the push and pull of the sinister and the sublime, the juxtaposition of a poem about suicide with another about starfish. A similar dynamic is at work in “American Primitive,” which often finds the poet out of her comfort zone—in the ruins of a whorehouse, or visiting someone she loves in the hospital. More recently, “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac” ruminates on a diagnosis of lung cancer she received in 2012. “Do you need a prod? / Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” the poem asks. “Let me be as urgent as a knife, then.” 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)