Upstream: Selected Essays

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One of her most compelling essays is the one in which she took care of an injured gull in her home, including the surprising moments of exhilaration and fun together. Oliver’s poetry focused on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, “lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, I was, however, pleasantly surprised that many of her essays were almost poetic because of the way she described things.

Upstream | Penguin Random House Canada Excerpt from Upstream | Penguin Random House Canada

In essays, however, I find this narrative style falters, such as when Oliver beautifully describes a turtle in the pond or tracks in the sand, and then stops. I literally read these two sentences about ten times in a row, then brought the book to my husband and read them aloud and asked, "Is she saying what I think she's saying? She vanished into the woods, where she found “beauty and interest and mystery,” and she vanished into books. The second world—the world of literature—offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy. In literature, she had her fill of the “clear and sweet and savory emotion” absent from the reality of her ordinary world, until reading alone was no longer enough — writing beckoned as the mighty world-building force that it is.Oliver’s poetry,” wrote Poetry magazine contributor Richard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple-or a green field-a place to enter, and in which to feel. A slim but thought-provoking collection that is rooted in Nature's impact on our lives both external and internal. For today's daily dose of poetry, beauty, and devotion, here's an incomplete collection of my favorite Mary Oliver quotes for you. A collection of three parts, the latter two being expansions on the first, Upstream is Oliver's beautifully writ reflection on where she comes from, her kinship with the natural world and its wild ones, and the authors that have warmed her blood and quickened her own ink.

Mary Oliver Mary Oliver

We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. there's a before and after reading this both in terms of connecting to myself and encouraging me to make attempts to connect to everything outside of myself too. In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction.

My company were violets, Dutchman’s-breeches, spring beauties, trilliums, bloodroot, ferns rising so curled one could feel the upward push of the delicate hairs upon their bodies. But also the universe is brisk and businesslike, and no doubt does not give its delicate landscapes or its thunderous displays of power, and perhaps perception, too, for our sakes or our improvement.

Upstream : selected essays : Oliver, Mary, 1935- : Free

I loved to go out in the rain, jump in puddles, play in little streams and find clay, ride my bike, or just lay in the grass and listen.

And this is exactly the reason for my self-prescribed daily dose of poetry: as Oliver herself put it, “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. There are perhaps no days of our childhood that we lived as fully,” Proust wrote in contemplating why we read, “as the days we think we left behind without living at all: the days we spent with a favourite book. As a teenager coming of age in Ohio in the 1950s, Oliver says she felt painfully different; certainly one could assume her sexuality and literary ambitions set her apart.

Mary Oliver Quotes (Author of A Thousand Mornings) - Goodreads Mary Oliver Quotes (Author of A Thousand Mornings) - Goodreads

Hello Lilian Willow, and Noah, the oak tree I have hugged and kissed every first day of spring for the last thirty years. 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. We build and maintain all our own systems, but we don’t charge for access, sell user information, or run ads. I savored it each morning with my coffee in one hand, my e-reader in the other, and the sunrise in my vision.The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work.