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) 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.' Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. Let’s conclude this selection of Mary Oliver’s best poems with one of her best-known and best-loved: ‘The Journey’. This is a poem about undertaking the difficult but rewarding journey of saving the one person you can save: yourself. We discuss this poem in more depth here. Devotions provides a fitting culmination of her life philosophy, her core tenets bound together in one vulnerable place. Ultimately, her work divulges with astute observation the crux of what we are: at once human and animal, at once selfish and full of gratitude, at once perfect and profoundly flawed. The paradoxical balancing act between shameless desire and overwhelming selflessness is deftly traversed through her lush turns of phrase:

It's as if the poet herself has sidled beside the reader and pointed us to the poems she considers most worthy of deep consideration." - Chicago Tribune Reading a couple of Oliver’s poems each morning is like having a devotion, a communion of sorts with the beauty that resides in the goodness around us. This review will be built up bit by bit at the breakfast table. Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as “far and away, this country’s best selling poet” by Dwight Garner, here for the first time is the stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. It’s as if the poet herself has sidled beside the reader and pointed us to the poems she considers most worthy of deep consideration.”—Chicago Tribune From Dog Songs (2013) is a heartwarming collection of poems that will resonate with readers who love dogs. Oliver wrote with deep affection for her dogs and devoted a handful to Percy ‘our new dog, named for the beloved poet.’

Good news—this is your 5th America article this month.

A collection of poems to dip in and out of, as the spirit moves. Much of the natural world Oliver describes is unfamiliar to me: it was often difficult to see what she was seeing. But feel what she was feeling? Emphatically yes. Oliver's poems succeed beautifully in conveying what it felt like to see what she saw. Poetry, May, 1987, p. 113; September, 1991, p. 342; July, 1993, David Barber, review of New and Selected Poems, p. 233; August, 1995, Richard Tillinghast, review of White Pine, p. 289; August, 1999, Christian Wiman, review of Rules for the Dance, p. 286.

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. In 1953, the day after she graduated from high school, Oliver left home. On a whim, she decided to drive to Austerlitz, in upstate New York, to visit Steepletop, the estate of the late poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. She and Millay’s sister Norma became friends, and Oliver “more or less lived there for the next six or seven years,” helping organize Millay’s papers. She took classes at Ohio State University and at Vassar, though without earning a degree, and eventually moved to New York City. Beginning with a string of similes to describe the threatening and fearsome idea of approaching death, this poem develops into a plea for curiosity in the face of death and what might come next. Eternity, Oliver asserts, is a ‘possibility’, but this is a poem more concerned with living a curious life now, in this one guaranteed life we have. 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.

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of her work fixated on subjects including identity, mortality, and nature, often blending these vital fascinations within the same poem: 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. There is a pleasing, relaxed contrast to the busyness of the sea pulling away, the gulls walking, seaweeds spilling over themselves. Oliver said, 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. Oliver continued her celebration of the natural world in her next collections, including Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004 ), and Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (2010). Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman. “Oliver’s poetry,” wrote Poetry magazine contributor Richard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling.” I don’t remember ever encountering Mary Oliver in a creative writing classroom; I do, however, recall reading her poetry in a Catholic spirituality group formed by women from several generations, all 20 of us eager to talk about faith.