Devotions

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While society has grown a little wiser to how the technologies can be exploited by foreign governments and boiler rooms spewing misinformation, the costs of allowing our attention to be commandeered remain drastically understated. It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs. New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1983, pp. 10, 22; November 25, 1990, p. 24; December 13, 1992, p. 12. Beginning with a string of similes to describe the threatening and fearsome idea of approaching death, this poem develops into a plea for curiosity in the face of death and what might come next. Eternity, Oliver asserts, is a ‘possibility’, but this is a poem more concerned with living a curious life now, in this one guaranteed life we have. Now here's the first verse of a poem the title of which is a spoiler. Please, Ms Oliver, could you not have let us try to "pay attention" and figure out what you were referencing? 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.')

Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. In addition to such major awards as the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Oliver received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. 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

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There is a constancy or fidelity in nature elegantly communicated in my favorite poem in this collection: Booklist, July, 1994, Pat Monaghan, review of A Poetry Handbook, p. 1916; November 15, 1994, Donna Seaman, review of White Pine, p. 574; June 1, 1997, Donna Seaman, review of West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems, p. 1648; June 1, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse, p. 1708; March 15, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of Winter Hours, p. 1279; September 1, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of The Leaf and the Cloud, p. 58; March 15, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Long Life: Essays and Other Writings, p. 1259. In keeping with the American impulse toward self-improvement, the transformation Oliver seeks is both simpler and more explicit. Unlike Rilke, she offers a blueprint for how to go about it. Just pay attention, she says, to the natural world around you—the goldfinches, the swan, the wild geese. They will tell you what you need to know. With a few exceptions, Oliver’s poems don’t end in thunderbolts. Theirs is a gentler form of moral direction.

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. In 1953, the day after she graduated from high school, Oliver left home. On a whim, she decided to drive to Austerlitz, in upstate New York, to visit Steepletop, the estate of the late poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. She and Millay’s sister Norma became friends, and Oliver “more or less lived there for the next six or seven years,” helping organize Millay’s papers. She took classes at Ohio State University and at Vassar, though without earning a degree, and eventually moved to New York City. 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 TribunePulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver’s personal selection of her best work, in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career I don’t remember ever encountering Mary Oliver in a creative writing classroom; I do, however, recall reading her poetry in a Catholic spirituality group formed by women from several generations, all 20 of us eager to talk about faith. What called to me at that reading was a poem from her most recent collection at that time, Thirst: It doesn’t have to be 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.’

Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Devotions is a stunning, definitive and carefully curated collection featuring work from over fifty years of writing - from Oliver's very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through to her last collection, Felicity, published in 2015. 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.

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Yet I saw my peers quote from “The Summer Day,” which ends, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” Others hedged their remembrances, saying, “I know some of you don’t like her poetry, but she was important to me because…”