Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

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As she contemplated her role as a poet, she took inspiration from the ease with which nature eloquently declared its charms.

While I might not have fallen in love with her style, I can easily see why it speaks so deeply to others. But there's not one in this collection that resonated with me and Mary Oliver curated this herself, oddly going backwards from her latter work to the beginning. Central to her perspective is the interconnectedness of all things, regardless of their tenuous association.

The occasion for the profile was the release of a book of Oliver’s poems about dogs, which, naturally, endeared her further to her loyal readers while generating a new round of guffaws from her critics. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches and power in the world. She is a perfect poet to pass to someone looking for an entryway into the world of poetry, and her focus on life as seen through nature is always easy to identify with. A handful of poems draw attention to the miracle of redbird chicks chirping for food, whistling swans in a posture of prayer, and lilies bowing to the ‘tug of desire. 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.

His poem treats an encounter with a work of art that is also, somehow, an encounter with a god—a headless figure that nonetheless seems to see him and challenge him. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love, from Oliver's exuberant dog poems to selections from the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive, and Dream Work, one of her exceptional collections. I took this slowly and read 10-20 pages each morning over my first coffee and it became my solace, the way Oliver describes nature is unmatched and I am so sad it’s over.Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers. Featured, too, in Red Birds (2008) are Oliver’s thoughts about mortality, this life, amassing things, and chasing our ambitions. 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.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980. it was so interesting to see which poems mary oliver picked out as her favorites, or as what she thought encompassed her collective works. Describing the swan as an ‘armful of white blossoms’, Oliver captures the many facets of the swan’s appearance and graceful movements. To read her work without this embodied sense is to miss the beauty of the energetic transmission within the words. What saves this, and many other Mary Oliver poems from sentimentality is the acknowledgment of how ‘ridiculous’ the birds’ singing contest is, even while it is deliriously life-affirming too.One of the most striking things one notices is that most of the poems are of sights on her daily walks near her home in Provincetown in New England. Her last books included A Thousand Mornings (2012), Dog Songs (2013), Blue Horses (2014), Felicity (2015), Upstream: Selected Essays (2016), and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017).

It was in childhood as well that Oliver discovered both her belief in God and her skepticism about organized religion.Mary Oliver is saving my life,” Paul Chowder, the title character of Nicholson Baker’s novel “ The Anthologist,” scrawls in the margins of Oliver’s “ New and Selected Poems, Volume One.