Mary Oliver

It is no exaggeration to say that she gave me the blueprint, the road map, for the rest of my life. Mary Oliver taught me how to live.

Opening this book is like opening the sun. Let it warm you, thrill you, and shine a light on the dark places. Essential reading.

Oliver’s writing contains multitudes, revelling in visionary observations on the infinitesimal and the infinite regarding nature and our humble place within it. Reading her makes the difficult world we live in more bearable, even sweet. With great acuity and care, she creates poems in which rest and respite are possible for us all. As a young poet encountering Oliver’s work for the first time during my early twenties, I learnt from her devotion to language that everything – both sacred and mundane – is worthy of attention, which is to say, worthy of poetry.

[In] so much of her poetry, just a few seemingly simple phrases perfectly express what we need to know just then, in that moment. The symmetry we feel when we are connected, at one with nature and the world.

It doesn’t feel like you have to take a seminar in order to understand Mary Oliver’s poetry. She’s speaking directly to you as a human being.

Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations.

I learned from Mary Oliver how attention is a kind of love, how shining your mind’s light on a thing – a grasshopper, a bird, a tree – is a way of showing gratitude. I learned that poems do not need to be “difficult” to be intelligent, that poems can be both inspirational and investigative, that poems can be tender without being soft. I learned from her to own my wonder and to stay open to uncertainty.

As an atheist, the poetry of Mary Oliver is the closest I come to prayer.

I think we do not have many poets like Oliver, who without apology affirms life everywhere she observes it.

One of the astonishing aspects of Oliver's work is the consistency of tone over this long period. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets [. . .] There is no complaint in Ms. Oliver's poetry, no whining, but neither is there the sense that life is in any way easy [. . .] These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward.

One would have to reach back perhaps to John Clare or Christopher Smart to safely cite a parallel to Oliver's lyricism or radical purification and her unappeasable mania for signs and wonders.

1965-2005

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. 
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down 
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, 
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, 
which is what I have been doing all day. 
Tell me, what else should I have done? 
 
Few modern poets are as beloved or as quoted as Mary Oliver. Spanning the major decades of her long career, this collection showcases Oliver’s remarkable lyrical powers and her reverential attention to the natural world. Her poetry sees life everywhere and asks what to do with it ­– how can we find our place among such beauty, such pain? 
 
Populated by wading birds, early snowfalls and swaying cornfields, her reflections are the record of a life spent walking alone in the wild. These timeless poems meet and touch their reader in any season of life, brightened by Oliver’s gift for amazement, shadowed by her constant awareness of harshness and death. Her words teach us to live with our eyes open wider.

Mary Oliver

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