I never met any of my friends, of course, in a usual way—they were strangers, and lived only in their writings. But if they were only shadow-companions, stillthey were constant, and powerful, and amazing. That is, they said amazing things, and for me it changed the world.

Upstream - Mary Oliver - The Library Upstream - Mary Oliver - The Library

I have a weird relationship with Mary Oliver. I own, and have read, several of her books. Most of them are poetry, but a couple of them are essay collections (as Upstream is). I generally like most of her books, and it excites me to see someone making some kind of a living off selling poetry. Though, where Ms. Oliver lives (a beaver hut?) is yet to be determined by me. Often called the most beloved poet in America, Mary Oliver was the first name I had in mind when I decided to read more poetry this year. Her deep sense of wonder, natural imagery, and simple language pulled me in; the solace I found in her words kept me there. 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 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-beta-20210815 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9194 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-1200059 Openlibrary_edition

NW Orchard

Above all, Oliver observes from the “fortunate platform” of a long, purposeful, and creatively fertile life, the artist’s task is one of steadfast commitment to the art: Uniting essays from Oliver’s previous books and elsewhere, this gem of a collection offers a compelling synthesis of the poet’s thoughts on the natural, spiritual and artistic worlds . . .” — The New York Times

Mary Oliver Issues A Full-Throated Spiritual - NPR Mary Oliver Issues A Full-Throated Spiritual - NPR

In creative work — creative work of all kinds— those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities. Oliver terms this the “intimate interrupter” and cautions that it is far more perilous to creative work than any external distraction, adding: Rebecca Solnit, in her beautiful meditation on the life-saving vanishing act of reading, wrote: “I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods.” Oliver disappeared into both. For her, the woods were not a metaphor but a locale of self-salvation — she found respite from the brutality of the real world in the benediction of two parallel sacred worlds: nature and literature. She vanished into the woods, where she found “beauty and interest and mystery,” and she vanished into books. In a sentiment that calls to mind Kafka’s unforgettable assertion that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” Oliver writes:There are reflections on the way life used to be in small towns when bears were more welcome, dogs could roam free, and dwellings were constructed like patchwork quilts. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980. And when I'm reading lines like these, I feel like Ms. Oliver is a kindred spirit, and I feel proud of her writing and long career. . . She's so sure of herself, she tells readers in a rather nonchalant way about nursing from her cat. She seriously just dropped this: Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do — fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.

Mary Oliver Quotes about Nature, Beauty, Devotion, and 21 Mary Oliver Quotes about Nature, Beauty, Devotion, and

And whoever thinks these are worthy, breathy words I am writing down is kind. Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them. You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.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.” And yet childhoods come in varied hues, some much darker than others; some children only survive by leaving the anguish of the real world behind and seeking shelter in the world of books. What Mary wrote here was a collection of rambling thoughts in beautiful prose and slapped the word essays on it as if that’s reason enough for people to read. Well, it might have been enough to say, “This my free association about turtles today!” and then maybe I wouldn’t have been so disappointed. Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998. 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.