When the poet Mary Oliver died last week at the age of 83, my social media feeds blossomed into a field of tributes. 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. Most mornings I’m up to see the sun, and that rising of the light moves me very much, and I’m used to thinking and feeling in words, so it sort of just happens. The hand touches the phone upon waking, even before it can rub the eye or reach across the bed to wake the spouse. For TLC straight to your inbox + life-affirming words I don't share anywhere else, just say the word.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain. 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. Devotions is a master collection of Mary Oliver’s poetry, collecting bits and pieces from other collections of her work over the course of her career, spanning from 1963 to 2015. For Ostriker, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’ .If you do not know this feeling in your body you will not be able to identify it purely from the mind. It is very nice to have selected poems from books not available as ebooks and those that are out of print: What Do We Know, The Leaf And The Cloud, White Pine, American Primitive, Twelve Moons, The River Styx, Ohio, and No Voyage. I need to feel when I read a poem that time and care has gone into the selection of each word, that it's been placed there as carefully as a jeweler with a loupe carefully uses their special tools to place precious gems in their setting. 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. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches and power in the world.

Reading a couple of Oliver’s poems each morning is like having a devotion, a communion of sorts with the beauty that resides in the goodness around us. I have discovered over and over again that reading Oliver’s poetry provides a transport of delight to beauty and wonder.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. Devotions provides a fitting culmination of her life philosophy, her core tenets bound together in one vulnerable place. Krista Tippett, interviewing Oliver for her radio show, “On Being,” referred to Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” which offers a consoling vision of the redemption possible in ordinary life, as “a poem that has saved lives.

Her collections are also highly decorated, winning the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive as well as the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems While at the St. This treasure trove, put together by Oliver herself, contains poetry from her first book of poetry, Voyage and Other Poems (1963), to her most recent collection, Felicity (2015).Like Rumi, another of her models, Oliver seeks to combine the spiritual life with the concrete: an encounter with a deer, the kisses of a lover, even a deformed and stillborn kitten.

and entwine the outer world with our inner worlds, where our place among “the family of things” is ascertained only through the intersection of the physical and cerebral realms. Four poems express the thankfulness one feels towards a beloved (a ‘gift’) and the pangs of impending or actual loss. 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.The poems contained her thoughts on two subjects: nature (the heron, the fish, the gray fox, the meadowlark, the panther, the pond, etc. this feeling what is in each moment leads deeper and deeper into an embodied connection and for me a reverential awe at the interconnectedness of all life which inspires in me a devotional love beyond words.