Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

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In addition to Rumi, Oliver’s spiritual model for some of these poems might be Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” a frequent reference point. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, much of Oliver’s work was influenced by the environment of her adopted home of Massachusetts and the landscape of Cape Cod. 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. No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love, from Oliver's exuberant dog poems to selections from the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive, and Dream Work, one of her exceptional collections. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.

This is a poem about undertaking the difficult but rewarding journey of saving the one person you can save: yourself. The critics can relax: Oliver herself did not want to live forever, only to be remembered if at all; as she says in one of the poems included in this collection; as "a bride married to amazement". If you live in the city like I do, I wonder if you have sometimes pined for the woods or a pocket of green where you can be in communion with the natural world. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

As for the volume as a body: Devotions presents a bouquet of Oliver's poems from across her long career in her own arrangement. Some were negative, some not and I found a few reviews of different books in the same publication -- including the New Yorker, New York Times and the Washington Post -- in which one critic wrote this is not poetry, this is nothing special at all and another, before or after, says it's magic and she is/was a treasure. Oliver’s “Swan,” a poem composed entirely in questions, presents an encounter with a swan rather than with a work of art, but to her the bird is similarly powerful. Rilke’s poem, a tightly constructed sonnet, depicts the speaker confronting a broken statue of the god and ends with the abrupt exhortation “You must change your life. I have discovered over and over again that reading Oliver’s poetry provides a transport of delight to beauty and wonder.

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another—why don’t you get going?

Just pay attention, she says, to the natural world around you—the goldfinches, the swan, the wild geese.