Through the darkest happenings of today’s world, Mary Oliver’s poetry continues to shine brightly and reminds us what it means to be present, appreciative, and most importantly, ourselves. Let’s conclude this selection of Mary Oliver’s best poems with one of her best-known and best-loved: ‘The Journey’. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Perhaps more important, the luminous writing provides respite from our crazy world and demonstrates how mindfulness can define and transform a life, moment by moment, poem by poem.

His poem treats an encounter with a work of art that is also, somehow, an encounter with a god—a headless figure that nonetheless seems to see him and challenge him. Identified as “far and away, this country’s best selling poet” by Dwight Garner, here for the first time is the stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. I felt a balm in my soul sharing Oliver’s nature study of the bees nuzzling against the roses, the white herons rising over blackwater, a honey locust tree in bloom, the thrush that heralds an early spring, the tern that wings its way on a summer’s day, or a tree that offers a ‘warm cave’ to the birds in autumn.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. When I read her words I feel the poetry in my being in a way that is well beyond mental imagery and cerebral dissection.

But although ‘joy’, the subject of ‘Don’t Hesitate’, is an abstraction, Oliver wonderfully pins it down here, acknowledging its potential for abundance or ‘plenty’ and telling us that joy was not meant to be a mere ‘crumb’.

the luminous writing provides respite from our crazy world and demonstrates how mindfulness can define and transform a life, moment by moment, poem by poem. 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. By ignoring the ‘bad advice’ the strident voices around us provide, and trusting our instinct, because, deep down, we already know what we have to do. If I'm reading a solid block of text I want it to scan, have sibilance; otherwise it's prose and in this case, not particularly good prose.

more than 50 years and featuring more than 200 poems, the collection shows Oliver, in the early years, turning away from grief and finding in nature a 'vast, incredible gift.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. 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. Poetry is wonderfully expressive, and features everything from the most intimate of stories to the grandest of adventures. Mary Oliver is saving my life,” Paul Chowder, the title character of Nicholson Baker’s novel “ The Anthologist,” scrawls in the margins of Oliver’s “ New and Selected Poems, Volume One. 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.