Upstream: Selected Essays

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Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. the social self, “fettered to a thousand notions of obligation”; and a third self, a sort of otherworldly awareness. Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Hobe Sound, Florida, until her death in early 2019. The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.

The attention of the seed to the draw of the moon is, I suppose, measurable, like the tilt of the planet.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet lovingly reflects on her relationship to nature and the written word. 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.

The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms was also evident in New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award . For her, all living things are interconnected: “not at this moment but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself. energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. We build and maintain all our own systems, but we don’t charge for access, sell user information, or run ads.Born of two ‘blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature,’ it partakes of the spirits of a journal, a commonplace book, and a meditation. Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child’s voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress. Now they just hold a great interest for me and her littering of classical Gothic texts in this made me so excited to continue my exploration of the genre. Exploring the twin pleasures of writing literature with essays on Whitman, Wordsworth, Poe, and Emerson and then the observations of the natural world—seeing it, hearing it, and responding to it, are the inspiration in this collection by poet Mary Oliver.

Actually what he studied was his relationship to the harmonies and also the discords of the natural world. Oliver also discusses “the inner vision” that has guided and driven her as she has moved “upstream” against conventional life currents.Hello Lilian Willow, and Noah, the oak tree I have hugged and kissed every first day of spring for the last thirty years. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. Our resources are crucial for knowledge lovers everywhere—so if you find all these bits and bytes useful, please pitch in. But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel.