I think I understand why people love them so: they're mostly about nature, they're happy, they make one feel good. I began my time with these poems while in the high hills, in a sunny meadow brimming with daisies and birdsong and surrounded by deodars stretching out to meet the sky—so you see how I felt these verses, completely entangled in the way in which Mary Oliver wrote, her unsophisticated but ecstatic dispensing of hope like a clear and sweet stream set never to run out. Though easily her best known quote is ‘ Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?

Devotions, The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver Devotions, The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver

Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Ultimately, however, the name of the collection, Devotions, provides perhaps the most salient clue to interpreting the collection as a whole: the poems in this book are collected as an act of prayer, or as a summing up of the prayers of a lifetime. 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. 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. MARY OLIVER ® is the registered trademark and service mark of NW Orchard LLC in the United States and various foreign countries.

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. 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). 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.

Devotions : The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - Google Books Devotions : The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver - Google Books

The seven poems Oliver selected from Swan (2010) for inclusion in Devotions beckoned us to embrace life, especially, to embrace joy. Central to her perspective is the interconnectedness of all things, regardless of their tenuous association.Oliver compared her job of putting words on a page to the greater brilliance found in the ‘verbal hilarity’ of a mockingbird or the pure gracefulness of a white heron. This past week as the weight of work bore down on me, I sought refuge in her verse, and read a couple each evening.