Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

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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. 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.

In Tides, Oliver’s keen eye surveyed the sea (‘blue gray green lavender’), old whalebones, white fish spines, barnacle-clad stones, and the ‘piled curvatures’ of seaweeds. have you ever dared to pray, ' and 'Tell me, what it is you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life? Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another—why don’t you get going? On the morning the Pulitzer was announced, she was scouring the town dump for shingles to use on her house. 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.Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. What makes us human, aside from the ability to feel love and despair, is our imaginative capability, and this human quality can enable us to forge links with the rest of nature and find a place within the ‘family of things’.

Although these poems are lovely, offering a singular and often startling way of looking at God, the predominance of the spiritual and the natural in the collection ultimately flattens Oliver’s range. Yet the dominant note is the wonder of the world around her that makes me wonder as to how much I miss on daily walks.We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. His poem treats an encounter with a work of art that is also, somehow, an encounter with a god—a headless figure that nonetheless seems to see him and challenge him. you can find anything in here: on love, on nature, on time, on life, on sadness, on grief - anything and everything. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches and power in the world. more than 50 years and featuring more than 200 poems, the collection shows Oliver, in the early years, turning away from grief and finding in nature a 'vast, incredible gift.