Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

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Other poems contain Oliver’s reflections on the approach of winter and her own Life Story against the infinite cycle in nature’s diurnal ebb and flow.

Oliver, as a Times profile a few years ago put it, likes to present herself as “the kind of old-fashioned poet who walks the woods most days, accompanied by dog and notepad.the luminous writing provides respite from our crazy world and demonstrates how mindfulness can define and transform a life, moment by moment, poem by poem. No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love, from Oliver's exuberant dog poems to selections from the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive , and Dream Work , one of her exceptional collections.

Her talent was recognised early and during her lifetime she won a host of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her collection American Primitive, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement. more than 50 years and featuring more than 200 poems, the collection shows Oliver, in the early years, turning away from grief and finding in nature a 'vast, incredible gift. Her poetry invites in feelings of peace and gladness, in a simple heart felt way that isn’t forced or over exaggerated as some poetry can be. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver’s work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015.

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. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world. If I'm reading a solid block of text I want it to scan, have sibilance; otherwise it's prose and in this case, not particularly good prose. 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.