Devotions

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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, 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. Subjects like these reveal much about the way Oliver sees the world, and can therefore be considered personal poems. However, the poems in these earlier sections of the book share very few details of the poet’s life. Instead, these poems deal with the question of how to live well in general, and what it means to be human. With a few notable exceptions, the poems in the first half of the book do not offer more detail about the poet’s life than the name of her dogs and the fact that she teaches poetry. Mid-way the book, however, the poem “Flare” takes on the subject of Oliver’s difficult relationship with her parents. 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 Summary Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver Summary

There is a constancy or fidelity in nature elegantly communicated in my favorite poem in this collection: 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. Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. Devotions is a master collection of Mary Oliver’s poetry, collecting bits and pieces from other collections of her work over the course of her career, spanning from 1963 to 2015. This collection brought to mind the very little Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson I’ve read in her reverence for nature. This reverence of the natural world is what bound all of these poems into a more cohesive unit. A timely reminder that we can opt to be softer and kinder when our natural bent is to be just the reverse.

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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 update is based on a selection of poems ‘From Blue Horses (2014)'. The eleven poems in this collection expressed the repose and comfort Oliver found in the natural world and quietly invited the reader to share her gratitude. She truly was a poet after the nature lover’s own heart. 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.')

Poetry / Mary Oliver Poetry / Mary Oliver

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career.

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of her work fixated on subjects including identity, mortality, and nature, often blending these vital fascinations within the same poem: