Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

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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. If you live in the city like I do, I wonder if you have sometimes pined for the woods or a pocket of green where you can be in communion with the natural world.

At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal ‘a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy / like a shadow. To read her work without this embodied sense is to miss the beauty of the energetic transmission within the words. 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. Oliver can be an enticing celebrant of pure pleasure—in one poem she imagines herself, with a touch of eroticism, as a bear foraging for blackberries—but more often there is a moral to her poems.

If you do not know this feeling in your body you will not be able to identify it purely from the mind. Oliver's essays have appeared in Best American Essays 1996, 1998, 2001; the Anchor Essay Annual 1998, as well as Orion, Onearth and other periodicals. One of the few poems of social comment is on the death of Tecumseh, one of the native leaders who fought displacement from the Ohio lands.

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. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. The work of the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019) has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves, yet it’s been estimated that she was the bestselling poet in the United States at the time of her death. Here, Oliver once again yokes together human feeling with her observations of nature, as the dogfish tear open ‘the soft basins of water’.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. Here, nature is once again the theme: the ‘invitation’ of this poem is to come and see the goldfinches that have gathered in a field of thistles. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems , published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity , published in 2015.

A couple working as chauffeurs have been accused of stealing millions from the founder of Tin House Books. In a selection of poems like those in this book, covering over fifty years of poetry, a lot of the poems’ overall context is missing. 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. Mary Oliver was an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books, “particularly to its lesser-known aspects.

Oliver continued her celebration of the natural world in her next collections, including Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004 ), and Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (2010). But an equal part is that she offers her readers a spiritual release that they might not have realized they were looking for.

The reference “into thanks” reflects another theme running through her work, a profound thankfulness for life, even in its transience. 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). Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001.

This short poem is unlike many of the poems mentioned so far in that it is not a nature poem at all, but a poem which deals in the abstract. From 1995, for five years, she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College. 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. Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works. 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.