Devotions

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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. Beginning with her first book in 1963, Mary Oliver’s poetry has been a touchstone for understanding our world and ourselves. She described her work as loving the world. Her poems capture the human spirit and nature’s complexity with wonder and awe. Starting with an openness to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments, Mary Oliver is a determined explorer of the mysteries of our daily experience.

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - AbeBooks Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - AbeBooks

Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul. But isn’t the return of spring and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?” Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.” THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes there are no rules.” I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.”

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Mary Oliver doesn't just write about nature, she writes about our Oneness with nature. She comes across her insights, often, in a state of Bliss. To read her is a spiritual experience in itself. Here are excerpts from two poems I love. The first is prose-like and too lovely not to reproduce in full. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Devotions Quotes by Mary Oliver - Goodreads Devotions Quotes by Mary Oliver - Goodreads

I also appreciate her idea of meditation, which was lounging under a tree and falling asleep. That it can be refreshing is evident in these lines:words bestow a brave dogma of openness with the universe, the perils of existence, and the undefinable devotions shared between one another: A collection of poems to dip in and out of, as the spirit moves. Much of the natural world Oliver describes is unfamiliar to me: it was often difficult to see what she was seeing. But feel what she was feeling? Emphatically yes. Oliver's poems succeed beautifully in conveying what it felt like to see what she saw. I will mention them now, / I will not mention them again,” Oliver writes of her parents, after speaking in sympathetic but oblique terms about her relationship with them (70-71). The poem seems to take place at the time of Oliver’s burying her parents, and as she says in this poem, they do not appear in her work in any of the later poems which are collected earlier in the book. This poem proves to be a turning point, however, and the poems that follow it, from earlier in Oliver’s career, reveal more personal details about her life.

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver|Paperback Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver|Paperback

In Tides, Oliver’s keen eye surveyed the sea (‘blue gray green lavender’), old whalebones, white fish spines, barnacle-clad stones, and the ‘piled curvatures’ of seaweeds. There is a pleasing, relaxed contrast to the busyness of the sea pulling away, the gulls walking, seaweeds spilling over themselves. Oliver said, Growing up in Ohio, Oliver said in one of her rare interviews that she ‘ felt those first important connections, those first experiences being made with the natural world rather than with the social world.’ Perhaps for this reason much of her poetry uses the natural world as the lens through which she peers into the human heart and mind. At 17, Oliver would befriend Norma, the sister to poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and spend most of a decade organizing St. Vincent Millay’s papers while working for her estate. 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. Her collections are also highly decorated, winning the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive as well as the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems While at the St. Vincent Millay estate she would meet Molly Malone Cook, who would become her life-long partner as well as agent until Molly passed in 2005. Molly had previously owned a bookstore where she employed a young John Waters before he became a celebrated filmmaker and the couple maintained a friendship with him for the remainder of their lives. Though my favorite anecdote is that, while working as Mary’s agent, whenever a call came in for her, Molly would just pretend to be her on the phone and eventually editors just came to accept her as the same as actually speaking to Mary. Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.”It is easy to see why one might perchance envy a dog’s life – ‘breaking the new snow with wild feet’ and ‘not thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.’ I’d like to believe she achieved this and if her poetry is any testament to a life lived, then it was a life well lived. If you haven’t read Mary Oliver before, definitely do so as soon as possible. Even those who don’t usually read poetry tend to love her. Mary Oliver achieved great popularity but also great depth of heart and will live on as one of the greats of our time. These poems were inspired by what is often unobserved - Queen Anne’s Lace in an 'unworked field' making ‘all the loveliness it can’ or a swan ‘rising into the silvery air, an armful of white blossoms, a perfect commotion of silk and linen.’ They also steer our thoughts toward beneficent ways of approaching the hosts of things that worry us or claim our lives. Most of all, I love reading about how she went about walking in the woods. acceptance of one’s darkness, and the will to strive for unflinching compassion above all else. Her I'm also going to look for a location called Truro. Apparently it was wild enough, a few decades ago, that people who said they saw a bear were almost believed. Now, it must be in the East somewhere, because in the West bears are relatively common 'pests.'

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - AbeBooks

Some of this, the more structured areas of the collection, I liked very much. Others, the more free flowing, stream-of-consciousness selections, didn’t resonate with me at all. For poems so firmly rooted in the physical realm, they tended to feel very ephemeral, which is a writing choice I always have difficulty connecting with. However, there were certain lines that resonated so strongly. While I might not have fallen in love with her style, I can easily see why it speaks so deeply to others. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to 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.” Featured in Red Birds (2008) are poems that show her love of animals that share our world. In Night Herons, Oliver observed the herons fishing at night. Only a poet with her sensitivity would have contemplated what it meant for the fish who were ‘full of fish happiness’ one moment and then became the herons’ supper the next. In Invitation, Oliver invited us to linger just to listen to the ‘musical battle’ of the goldfinches because their ‘melodious striving’ revealed the ‘sheer delight and gratitude...of being alive.’ The saddest poem is Red about two gray foxes that were run over by cars and how she carried them to the fields and watched them bleed to death ('Gray fox and gray fox. Red, red, red.')of her work fixated on subjects including identity, mortality, and nature, often blending these vital fascinations within the same poem: From Dog Songs (2013) is a heartwarming collection of poems that will resonate with readers who love dogs. Oliver wrote with deep affection for her dogs and devoted a handful to Percy ‘our new dog, named for the beloved poet.’