Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.” — Mary Oliver, Devotions

In so much of her work, she uses nature to point to the sacred. Then she verbalizes truths you didn't know you had buried in you. And somehow, she makes you feel more comfortable being human. 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. This review is on selected poems from two collections published in 2008: The Truro Bear and Other Adventures and Red Birds. The poems contained her thoughts on two subjects: nature (the heron, the fish, the gray fox, the meadowlark, the panther, the pond, etc.) and self (ambition and dying). It amazes me how the most ordinary things can summon up contemplation that gives us pause. 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.')

Good news—this is your 5th America article this month.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980. Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998. New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1983, pp. 10, 22; November 25, 1990, p. 24; December 13, 1992, p. 12. This review update is based on a selection of poems ‘From Blue Horses (2014)'. The eleven poems in this collection expressed the repose and comfort Oliver found in the natural world and quietly invited the reader to share her gratitude. She truly was a poet after the nature lover’s own heart.

I wanted to read Oliver beyond her most popular, so I started with Upstream: Selected Essays and A Thousand Mornings.) Publishers Weekly, May 4, 1990, p. 62; August 10, 1992, p. 58; June 6, 1994, review of A Poetry Handbook, p. 62; October 31, 1994, review of White Pine, p. 54; August 7, 1995, review of Blue Pastures, p. 457; June 30, 1997, review of West Wind, p. 73; March 29, 1999, review of Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems, p. 100; August 28, 2000, review of The Leaf and the Cloud, p. 79; July 21, 2003, review of Owls and Other Fantasies, p. 188.On a return visit to Austerlitz, in the late fifties, Oliver met the photographer Molly Malone Cook, ten years her senior. “I took one look and fell, hook and tumble,” she would later write. “M. took one look at me, and put on her dark glasses, along with an obvious dose of reserve.” Cook lived near Oliver in the East Village, where they began to see each other “little by little.” In 1964, Oliver joined Cook in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Cook for several years operated a photography studio and ran a bookshop. (Among her employees was the filmmaker John Waters, who later remembered Cook as “a wonderfully gruff woman who allowed her help to be rude to obnoxious tourist customers.”) The two women remained together until Cook’s death, in 2005, at the age of eighty. All Oliver’s books, to that date, are dedicated to Cook. Still, her work became more and more spiritual. For example, her latest book, a collection of selected poems, is titled Devotions . The New Yorker’s Ruth Franklin notes that “many poems here would not feel out of place in a religious service, albeit a rather unconventional one.” It then transpires that the speaker is referring to a specific grasshopper, which is eating sugar out of her hand at that precise moment. Once again, Oliver takes us into particular moments, specific encounters with nature which surprise and arrest us. How can we ‘mend’ our lives? 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.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver, The Summer Day It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.” — Mary Oliver, Invitation 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.’ Of course, much has been said of Oliver's work—that it is too simple, or too naïve, or that its cadence derives not from metre but from a sense of harmony that many of us have been too dulled to attempt to feel. The critics can relax: Oliver herself did not want to live forever, only to be remembered if at all; as she says in one of the poems included in this collection; as "a bride married to amazement". And that she was. That we all can feel when we go out seeking the world through her words. From where I stand, Devotions is a wonderful place to start. There is a constancy or fidelity in nature elegantly communicated in my favorite poem in this collection:

Success!

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing — that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.” ― Mary Oliver, House of Light Though easily her best known quote is ‘ Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?’ which makes for perfect closing lines to The Summer Day. While often quoted without the full poem used as an inspirational message, what I love best about this line is that—in context—Oliver has already answered what she would do and that is to walk in the woods. Actually, it is such an amazing poem here is the whole thing: And sorrow is a box full of darkness, given to the poet – for this, too, she realises, is a ‘gift’. (It’s a cliché that writers use even their sorrows for inspiration, turning the worst moments of their lives into something positive – but this poem puts such a sentiment more lyrically and memorably.) I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.” — Mary Oliver Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable.