I want to ask her an endless amount of questions about writing and reading, about different birds and trees, about life and passion. There's hardly a page in my copy of Upstream that isn't folded down or underlined and scribbled on, so charged is Oliver's language . Actually what he studied was his relationship to the harmonies and also the discords of the natural world.

As a teenager coming of age in Ohio in the 1950s, Oliver says she felt painfully different; certainly one could assume her sexuality and literary ambitions set her apart. The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work. 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. I enjoyed some more than others, purely because I had more interest in the topics discussed, rather than some being of weaker constitution than others. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

Of the 100 pages or so of content, the standout moment is when Oliver describes finding a maimed bird and taking it home for attempted rehabilitation. In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view time's shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poe's narrators. i had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before i knew at all who i was, what i was, what i wanted to be.

Her keen observations come as narrative (following a fox) or as manual (building a house) or as poems masquerading as description (“I have seen bluefish arc and sled across the water, an acre of them, leaping and sliding back under the water, then leaping again, toothy, terrible, lashed by hunger”). Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. I walked, all one spring day, upstream, sometimes in the midst of the ripples, sometimes along the shore.

Oliver's essays on Whitman, Emerson, and Poe are insightful pieces that were immensely enjoyable to read. A collection of three parts, the latter two being expansions on the first, Upstream is Oliver's beautifully writ reflection on where she comes from, her kinship with the natural world and its wild ones, and the authors that have warmed her blood and quickened her own ink.It's been a long time since I read a book in one sitting, but conditions were just right yesterday: a 175-page book with good-sized font, a sympathetic author, a dock on a Maine lake with high wind and whitecaps (always the best reading venue). Instead, she respectfully conferred subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition. When reading Mary Oliver in any form—poetry or prose—you oughtn’t be surprised when suddenly you find yourself at a full stop. Born in a small town in Ohio,Mary Oliverpublished her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28.

I, too, turn into a dramatic sigh-swoon loser who reads Mary Oliver whenever my brain starts to get glitchy. The beautiful writing and thoughts that are expressed in her poetry are also expressed in her writing.

Oliver immerses us in an ever-widening circle, in which a shrub or flower opens onto the cosmos, revealing our meager, masterful place in it. Who knows when supreme patience took hold, and the wind’s wandering among its leaves was enough of motion, of travel. Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Press for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. I read them as I would an essay and not a poem, expecting her to engage in some kind of thoughtful, organized communication about various meanings or arguments on her subject.