s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]'s Reviews > Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

‘A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.’

An absolute icon of modern poetry.
Once called the ‘indefatigable guide to the natural world,’ by Maxine Kumin, winner of both the Pulitzer and National Book Award, one of the bestselling and best-loved US poets of all-time, Mary Oliver is an undeniable gem of poetry. With a style that is as accessible as it is ponderous and moving, Oliver’s poetry elegantly examines life from the thin barrier between human and wild animal, our companionship with the world, to the confrontation and acceptance of darkness. Her words capture our finite existence in all its wonders and beauty where even ‘a box full of darkness’ can be understood ‘that this, too, was a gift.’ I’ve been reading Oliver for years and every time I think I’ve exhausted her collections for poems that nearly knock me to the floor I discover another and its like the sky opening up and all of the cosmos raining down into my heart. She’s absolutely perfect. Those looking for an in-depth and expansive look at her works should certainly turn to Devotions, a selected poems spanning her entire career from her first collection, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 when Oliver was only 28, to her final book in 2015, Felicity. Though Oliver passed in 2019 at the age of 83, her poetry will live on and I suspect that as long as poems are being read, she will be a name remembered for generations to come.

Don’t Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

There is magic enough in this world if we just remember to look. ‘Imagination is better than a sharp instrument,’ Mary Oliver says, reminding us, ‘to pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.’ Often we just need to step outside of ourselves a moment to see the world anew. Oliver reminds us what it is to be human in the most tender of ways and grants an empowering universiality to her work that makes us feel in communion with the world and one another in a manner that makes you glad to be alive, breathing this air, able to read her words. Take this poem for instance, from A Thousand Mornings: Poems:

Poem of the One World

This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.

Like the final lines state, to read a beautiful Mary Oliver is to feel beautiful oneself. To take those words inside you and let them purify your weary heart, dry your tears, remind you that even when you are miserable and wondering what to do, there is still work to be done and you can rise to the challenge.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

Growing up in Ohio, Oliver said in one of her rare interviews that she ‘felt those first important connections, those first experiences being made with the natural world rather than with the social world.’ 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. At 17, Oliver would befriend Norma, the sister to poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and spend most of a decade organizing St. Vincent Millay’s papers while working for her estate. She attended Ohio State University and Vassar College without finishing a degree, but once her first collection of poetry came out her career as a poet was well under way and she would later teach while working as a poet-in residence at several colleges before finishing her career as Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College. 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. Vincent Millay estate she would meet Molly Malone Cook, who would become her life-long partner as well as agent until Molly passed in 2005. Molly had previously owned a bookstore where she employed a young John Waters before he became a celebrated filmmaker and the couple maintained a friendship with him for the remainder of their lives. Though my favorite anecdote is that, while working as Mary’s agent, whenever a call came in for her, Molly would just pretend to be her on the phone and eventually editors just came to accept her as the same as actually speaking to Mary.

Molly and Mary

I Did Think, Let’s Go About This Slowly:

I did think, lets go about this slowly.
This is important, this should take
some really deep thought. We should take
small thoughtful steps.

But, bless us, we didn’t.

‘I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty of the world,’ Oliver said in an interview for On Being, and the act of looking into the world to find inspiration for poetry was what led her to the world that saved her. And it can save us too if we remember to look and be mindful (of this Oliver writes that she would like ‘people to remember of me how inexhaustible was her mindfulness’). And poetry can help awaken that. ‘As for the poem,’ she writes, ‘not this poem but any / poem, do you feel its sting? Do you feel / its hope, its entrance to a community? Do / you feel its hand in your hand?’ If our hearts are open, poetry can move us, and poetry helps us communicate. With the author, with each other, with the world. Poetry, Oliver says in the interview, is ‘ very sacred. It wishes for a community — it’s a community ritual, certainly,’ And, as she think of Marc’s painting, it can help make the world kinder if we remember to make something beautiful in order to share it.

‘And that’s why, when you write a poem, you write it for anybody and everybody. And you have to be ready to do that out of your single self. It’s a giving. It’s always — it’s a gift. It’s a gift to yourself, but it’s a gift to anybody who has a hunger for it.’

Oliver has always made poetry seem like a sacred act, like a prayer, and here, writing near the end of her life, we can see her reflect on how much poetry has been as much a blessing to her as it is to us, her readers.

to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go
   —From, In Blackwater Woods

Part of what has retained Mary Oliver’s popularity is she is so endlessly quotable and her numerous, beloved one-liners come from poems so good its almost a shame to highlight them without the full thing. Social media is full of her little nuggets of brilliance, such as (read full poems in links) ‘Listen – are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?’ (from Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches? ), ‘You only have to let / the soft animal of your body / love what it loves,’ (from Wild Geese ), ‘it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world,’ (from Invitation ) or slightly longer quotes such as:
‘Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.’
(from Sometimes )

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:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

That all is such a perfect expression of what Oliver’s poetry is like. ‘Welcome to the silly, comforting poem,’ Oliver begins her poem Flare which, oddly enough, is also perfect because her poems are SO comforting and uplifting. Even when she is talking about death, which she can manage in a way only Jane Hirshfield can do. Oliver’s prose borders on religious experience without ever being actually religious, or as Alicia Ostriker once wrote, Oliver is ‘among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey,’ as well as referring to her as equal to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Mornings at Blackwater

For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.

The poems are most often calm and thoughtful, echoing a serenity of nature and gazing in wonderment at the marvelous possibilities of existence. Even in poems such as The Kitten, which deals with burning a stillborn kitten, she writes ‘life is infinitely inventive, / saying, what other amazements / lie in the dark seed of the earth…’ When we read Oliver, we see life as alive with beauty and are better for it.

I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
   —From Starlings in Winter

What also helps make Oliver so popular is her accessibility, something she achieves through a directness without sacrificing depth or lacking in breathtaking poetic phrasing. She is a perfect poet to pass to someone looking for an entryway into the world of poetry, and her focus on life as seen through nature is always easy to identify with. Though her poems are not always nature oriented, and Oliver’s directness can be sharpened to cut as well. Such as this one:

Of The Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

‘Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable,’ Oliver wrote, and her poetry is a perfect tool for ensuring that space is kept open. To read Oliver is to approach what must be what some call ‘the Divine,’ and I’ve never once regretted picking up a volume of hers to read. Even her collection all about dogs is nothing but sheer bliss pouring into your heart. It was tragic to lose her in 2019, right around the same time another giant of modern US poetry who also excelled at poetry harnessing the natural word, W.S. Merwin, passed but her words certainly outlive her and most likely even you and I. In her poem When Death Comes , Oliver writes:

‘When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world’

I’d like to believe she achieved this and if her poetry is any testament to a life lived, then it was a life well lived. If you haven’t read Mary Oliver before, definitely do so as soon as possible. Even those who don’t usually read poetry tend to love her. Mary Oliver achieved great popularity but also great depth of heart and will live on as one of the greats of our time.

5/5

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life that you could save.

Crazy Little Love Song

I don’t want eventual,
I want soon.
It’s 5 a.m. It’s noon.
It’s dusk falling to dark.
I listen to music.
I eat up a few wild poems
while time creeps along
as though it’s got all day.
This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you.