Devotions

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How can we ‘mend’ our lives? By ignoring the ‘bad advice’ the strident voices around us provide, and trusting our instinct, because, deep down, we already know what we have to do. I'm also going to look for a location called Truro. Apparently it was wild enough, a few decades ago, that people who said they saw a bear were almost believed. Now, it must be in the East somewhere, because in the West bears are relatively common 'pests.' The shortest poem on this list, running to just four short, accessible lines of verse, ‘The Uses of Sorrow’ once again provides us with a concrete image for an abstract emotion: here, sorrow, rather than joy. There is a constancy or fidelity in nature elegantly communicated in my favorite poem in this collection:

Now here's the first verse of a poem the title of which is a spoiler. Please, Ms Oliver, could you not have let us try to "pay attention" and figure out what you were referencing? acceptance of one’s darkness, and the will to strive for unflinching compassion above all else. Her Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable.

note again that GR won't hold spacing, and most poetry is shaped by indented lines, so bear in mind that my samples are not quite accurate) 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 Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. In addition to such major awards as the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Oliver received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. Devotions is a master collection of Mary Oliver’s poetry, collecting bits and pieces from other collections of her work over the course of her career, spanning from 1963 to 2015. This collection brought to mind the very little Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson I’ve read in her reverence for nature. This reverence of the natural world is what bound all of these poems into a more cohesive unit. 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.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. The subject of these poems included the slippery green frog, stones on the beach, blueberries, a vulture’s wings, and the gorgeous bluebird. Reading the poems is like going on a nature ramble with her and seeing what we often take for granted with new eyes.