Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

Product Information

Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works. Much of the natural world Oliver describes is unfamiliar to me: it was often difficult to see what she was seeing. Walking in the woods, she developed a method that has become the hallmark of her poetry, taking notice simply of whatever happens to present itself. PRAYING 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. Though her lexis and subjects are deceptively simple, her ideas and overwhelming message are incredibly complex.

The child who had trouble with the concept of Resurrection in church finds it more easily in the wild.They reminded me of the old Swanson TV dinners in foil trays: uniformly prepared and only requiring heating. She published her first collection, “ No Voyage and Other Poems,” in 1963, when she was twenty-eight; “ American Primitive,” her fourth full-length book, won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1984, and “New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Award, in 1992. Rilke’s poem, a tightly constructed sonnet, depicts the speaker confronting a broken statue of the god and ends with the abrupt exhortation “You must change your life. The poems are most often calm and thoughtful, echoing a serenity of nature and gazing in wonderment at the marvelous possibilities of existence. 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.

Here, Oliver once again yokes together human feeling with her observations of nature, as the dogfish tear open ‘the soft basins of water’.The world seems to spin too fast for us to slow down, but slowing down is just the thing that would help us find our footing. 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. Some were negative, some not and I found a few reviews of different books in the same publication -- including the New Yorker, New York Times and the Washington Ostriker considered Oliver “among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey. Mary Oliver had nothing to prove; she led a happy life in beautiful places with her lifelong partner, and was celebrated, decorated and adored.

Her deep sense of wonder, natural imagery, and simple language pulled me in; the solace I found in her words kept me there. That side of Oliver’s work is necessary to fully appreciate her in her usual exhortatory or petitionary mode.

This selection of eleven poems is Mary’s reflections on love, her perceptive participation in the natural world, and her discovery of the things that matter. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be. I believe that the critics are missing the core of her work which comes from an embodied sense of the ecstatic connection to all things. And this is exactly the reason for my self-prescribed daily dose of poetry: as Oliver herself put it, “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

And don't think the poems deteriorate in quality as we get further in the book, to when Oliver was younger and less experienced.

Yet I saw my peers quote from “The Summer Day,” which ends, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life? Like the rest of her work this doesn't engage my mind or heart let alone make my soul sing or even hum.