Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

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I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.” 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. Alli, Mary Oliver is amazing! Her writing is so simple yet so rich at the same time. Reading her words is a reminder for me that being in nature among the simple things (like those things we used to do as kids!) is good for the soul, no matter how young or old you are. It’s not an escape from real life, but it IS life in its fullest. It is joy, connection, innocence, freedom… I miss it too! I think I’ll go outside now ;)

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career.

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In the poem, Evidence, Oliver reflected that memory can either be 'a golden bowl, or a basement without light' words bestow a brave dogma of openness with the universe, the perils of existence, and the undefinable devotions shared between one another: My other favorite is: I don’t want to be demure or respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years. That way, you forget too many important things.

Oliver tells us that no matter how lonely we get, the whole world is available to our imagination. What makes us human, aside from the ability to feel love and despair, is our imaginative capability, and this human quality can enable us to forge links with the rest of nature and find a place within the ‘family of things’. How can we ‘mend’ our lives? By ignoring the ‘bad advice’ the strident voices around us provide, and trusting our instinct, because, deep down, we already know what we have to do. Love yourself, then forget it, then love the world” stands out as good advice. Thank you for sharing. 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

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This review update is based on a selection of poems ‘From Blue Horses (2014)'. The eleven poems in this collection expressed the repose and comfort Oliver found in the natural world and quietly invited the reader to share her gratitude. She truly was a poet after the nature lover’s own heart. This is a beautiful collection of poetry from Mary Oliver. I finished it with a tear in my eye knowing there won't be anything more from her. She just passed away this year. There is something about her poetry that is comforting to me. I'm sorry she is gone. I wanted to read Oliver beyond her most popular, so I started with Upstream: Selected Essays and A Thousand Mornings.) The work of the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019) has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves, yet it’s been estimated that she was the bestselling poet in the United States at the time of her death. There is a thoughtful poem titled Storage on the joy of uncluttering. Below is a fitting response to ‘things’:

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. Most mornings I’m up to see the sun, and that rising of the light moves me very much, and I’m used to thinking and feeling in words, so it sort of just happens. I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and … almost involuntary in my life,” she says. “And when I talk about prayer, I mean really … what Rumi says in that wonderful line, ‘there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.'” — Mary OliverPRAYING It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.” Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. What made Mary Oliver so popular, so that she was at one time the bestselling poet in America? One answer we might venture is that she is an accessible nature poet but also effortlessly and brilliantly relates encounters with nature to those qualities which make us most human, with our flaws and idiosyncrasies. No Voyage, and Other Poems, Dent (New York, NY), 1963, expanded edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1965. 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.