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Upstream: Selected Essays

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The gull's injured body, Oliver says, is "a shattered elegance," one wing broken, the other hurt, both feet withered. The volume contains poems from eight of Oliver’s previous volumes as well as previously unpublished, newer work. Born in a small town in Ohio,Mary Oliverpublished her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28. Oliver also discusses “the inner vision” that has guided and driven her as she has moved “upstream” against conventional life currents.

Part of this something-elseness, Oliver argues, is the uncommon integration of the creative self — the artist’s work cannot be separated from the artist’s whole life, nor can its wholeness be broken down into the mechanical bits-and-pieces of specific actions and habits. A great collection on nature and literature from Mary Oliver, who is fast becoming a favorite of mine. Her work received early critical attention; American Primitive (1983) , her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize.That veering from one to the other provides a rhythm and structure that connects the essays in engaging ways. Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. And who knows what it dreamed of in the first springs of its life, escaping the cottontail’s teeth and everything dangerous else. She never fails to stir us from whatever is the natural speck before our gaze to the immeasurable heaven’s dome above and beyond. Dear Educators: Constance Baker Motley and the turbulent but hopeful era in which she lived and worked captivates students.

Born in a small town in Ohio, Mary Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28. The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost.

She wraps my head in bandages and keeps it from falling off; burdens it with the sublime as well as the common.

What Mary wrote here was a collection of rambling thoughts in beautiful prose and slapped the word essays on it as if that’s reason enough for people to read. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. the social self, “fettered to a thousand notions of obligation”; and a third self, a sort of otherworldly awareness.Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit.

T]his is what I learned: that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart. Nevertheless, the gull is responsive, even playful: he looks forward every day to a dip in the bathtub and then sunning himself and having his feathers smoothed by visitors.This review is based on an advance review copy received by the publisher through NetGalley for review purposes. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown.

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