Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

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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.

is a poem I refer to often when I am lost. I fell in love with Mary in the depths of loneliness after my divorce and a corporate soap opera ending. You pulled a lot of my favorites. This review is on selected poems from two collections published in 2008: The Truro Bear and Other Adventures and Red Birds. The poems contained her thoughts on two subjects: nature (the heron, the fish, the gray fox, the meadowlark, the panther, the pond, etc.) and self (ambition and dying). It amazes me how the most ordinary things can summon up contemplation that gives us pause.Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver, The Summer Day 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)

On a return visit to Austerlitz, in the late fifties, Oliver met the photographer Molly Malone Cook, ten years her senior. “I took one look and fell, hook and tumble,” she would later write. “M. took one look at me, and put on her dark glasses, along with an obvious dose of reserve.” Cook lived near Oliver in the East Village, where they began to see each other “little by little.” In 1964, Oliver joined Cook in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Cook for several years operated a photography studio and ran a bookshop. (Among her employees was the filmmaker John Waters, who later remembered Cook as “a wonderfully gruff woman who allowed her help to be rude to obnoxious tourist customers.”) The two women remained together until Cook’s death, in 2005, at the age of eighty. All Oliver’s books, to that date, are dedicated to Cook. 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’.

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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? White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field* is too long & too unified to present here, but know that it makes death a beautiful thing. Not to be chosen, no, but not to fear either.