Devotions

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It has been six months since I last read Mary Oliver’s poems. This past week as the weight of work bore down on me, I sought refuge in her verse, and read a couple each evening. 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. Featured, too, in Red Birds (2008) are Oliver’s thoughts about mortality, this life, amassing things, and chasing our ambitions. The following poems are the ones that stood out for me.

Devotions : The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - Google Books

The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Penguin Books, 2017. Here are excerpts from two poems I love. The first is prose-like and too lovely not to reproduce in full. 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 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.')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: 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.’ 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. There is a constancy or fidelity in nature elegantly communicated in my favorite poem in this collection: White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field* is too long & too unified to present here, but know that it makes death a beautiful thing. Not to be chosen, no, but not to fear either.

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

A timely reminder that we can opt to be softer and kinder when our natural bent is to be just the reverse. Devotions provides a fitting culmination of her life philosophy, her core tenets bound together in one vulnerable place. Ultimately, her work divulges with astute observation the crux of what we are: at once human and animal, at once selfish and full of gratitude, at once perfect and profoundly flawed. The paradoxical balancing act between shameless desire and overwhelming selflessness is deftly traversed through her lush turns of phrase: In an extraction of eleven poems from her collection of new poems from 2005, Oliver bade us pay attention to the natural world in every season. As she contemplated her role as a poet, she took inspiration from the ease with which nature eloquently declared its charms.

note again that GR won't hold spacing, and most poetry is shaped by indented lines, so bear in mind that my samples are not quite accurate) 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.

Devotions : The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - Google Books Devotions : The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - Google Books

There is a thoughtful poem titled Storage on the joy of uncluttering. Below is a fitting response to ‘things’: 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. Oliver’s poems in the opening sections of the book, beginning in her old age, contemplate the meaning of life and the way to find joy within it. The first poem presented in Devotions, from Oliver’s last original collection, Felicity, begins by asking, “Why do people keep asking to see / God’s identity papers / when the darkness opening into morning / is more than enough?” (1-4). As a thesis statement through which to begin the entire collection, it is a powerful one: the natural world, Oliver says, is proof of the divine. For the rest of the book, she presents the lessons she has learned from nature.In the poem, Evidence, Oliver reflected that memory can either be 'a golden bowl, or a basement without light' Newbies not interested in this whole big book might do well to start with Dog Songs. The charm of the subject of dogs & of the poems, and the mutual devotion (yes) between Oliver and her canine companions touches me, despite that I've never had a desire to own a dog. and entwine the outer world with our inner worlds, where our place among “the family of things” is ascertained only through the intersection of the physical and cerebral realms. Central to her perspective is the interconnectedness of all things, regardless of their tenuous association. The bulk