Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

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Born in a small town in Ohio, Mary Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28. Over the course of her long career, she received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Bennington College, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching. She died in 2019. 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.

Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. Devotions provides a fitting culmination of her life philosophy, her core tenets bound together in one vulnerable place. Ultimately, her work divulges with astute observation the crux of what we are: at once human and animal, at once selfish and full of gratitude, at once perfect and profoundly flawed. The paradoxical balancing act between shameless desire and overwhelming selflessness is deftly traversed through her lush turns of phrase: Though her lexis and subjects are deceptively simple, her ideas and overwhelming message are incredibly complex. Such morsels of wisdom may only emerge via scathing self-reflection,

Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. What made Mary Oliver so popular, so that she was at one time the bestselling poet in America? One answer we might venture is that she is an accessible nature poet but also effortlessly and brilliantly relates encounters with nature to those qualities which make us most human, with our flaws and idiosyncrasies. Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain. Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another—why don’t you get going? For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. 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.” Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Devotions is a stunning, definitive and carefully curated collection featuring work from over fifty years of writing – from Oliver’s very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through to her last collection, Felicity, published in 2015.

Oliver won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her work. Below, we select and introduce ten of Mary Oliver’s best poems, and offer some reasons why she continues to speak to us about nature and about ourselves. You can buy much of her best work in the magnificent volume of her selected poems, Devotions. Here are excerpts from two poems I love. The first is prose-like and too lovely not to reproduce in full.So many modern nature poets have written well about fish, whether it’s Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish’ or Ted Hughes’ ‘Pike’, to name just two famous examples. Here, Oliver once again yokes together human feeling with her observations of nature, as the dogfish tear open ‘the soft basins of water’.

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.” While society has grown a little wiser to how the technologies can be exploited by foreign governments and boiler rooms spewing misinformation, the costs of allowing our attention to be commandeered remain drastically understated. It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs. Some of this, the more structured areas of the collection, I liked very much. Others, the more free flowing, stream-of-consciousness selections, didn’t resonate with me at all. For poems so firmly rooted in the physical realm, they tended to feel very ephemeral, which is a writing choice I always have difficulty connecting with. However, there were certain lines that resonated so strongly. While I might not have fallen in love with her style, I can easily see why it speaks so deeply to others. In this collection of her selected poems, these are her favorites, not necessarily my favorites. I have loved her smaller, more intimate collections that all seemed to harmonize together. For that reason, on a personal level this collection is really a 4 star for me but I am giving her 5 stars because poetry is always subjective and there are many, many outstanding poems here.Death is something that comes ‘out of the dark’ or ‘out of the water.’ It is grotesque given it has ‘the head the size of a cat but muddy and without ears.’ Yet, right in the middle of seven stanzas we read: Yet I saw my peers quote from “The Summer Day,” which ends, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” Others hedged their remembrances, saying, “I know some of you don’t like her poetry, but she was important to me because…” Imagine... I have heard the name Tecumseh before but never knew who he was... now, because of a poem, I'm going to go learn some history. This is a beautiful collection of poetry from Mary Oliver. I finished it with a tear in my eye knowing there won't be anything more from her. She just passed away this year. There is something about her poetry that is comforting to me. I'm sorry she is gone. Mary Oliver doesn't just write about nature, she writes about our Oneness with nature. She comes across her insights, often, in a state of Bliss. To read her is a spiritual experience in itself.