Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

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The shortest poem on this list, running to just four short, accessible lines of verse, ‘The Uses of Sorrow’ once again provides us with a concrete image for an abstract emotion: here, sorrow, rather than joy. 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.

And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.” whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things”

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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 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. How have I never heard of Mary Oliver?! Love these! Being in nature has always made me feel so good. I often think about all the I spent outdoors by myself when I was younger. I loved to go out in the rain, jump in puddles, play in little streams and find clay, ride my bike, or just lay in the grass and listen. Getting up crazy early to watch meteor showers, sitting by bonfires with family, the list goes on! I miss it! 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. 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.

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. 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’. Oliver's body of work amounts to an instruction manual for how to love the world. For her, that story began with a walk in the woods. Though easily her best known quote is ‘ Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?’ which makes for perfect closing lines to The Summer Day. While often quoted without the full poem used as an inspirational message, what I love best about this line is that—in context—Oliver has already answered what she would do and that is to walk in the woods. Actually, it is such an amazing poem here is the whole thing:

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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: There is a constancy or fidelity in nature elegantly communicated in my favorite poem in this collection: In keeping with the American impulse toward self-improvement, the transformation Oliver seeks is both simpler and more explicit. Unlike Rilke, she offers a blueprint for how to go about it. Just pay attention, she says, to the natural world around you—the goldfinches, the swan, the wild geese. They will tell you what you need to know. With a few exceptions, Oliver’s poems don’t end in thunderbolts. Theirs is a gentler form of moral direction. Born in a small town in Ohio, Mary Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28. Over the course of her long career, she received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Bennington College, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching. She died in 2019.