Poetry is wonderfully expressive, and features everything from the most intimate of stories to the grandest of adventures. For these reasons and more, Devotions has sat on my nightstand since November when it was purchased, and there it will remain. She is relatable but whimsical with her thoughts on paper, in beautiful succinct sentences that flow effortlessly like water on the page. 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.

In addition to Rumi, Oliver’s spiritual model for some of these poems might be Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” a frequent reference point. Part of what has retained Mary Oliver’s popularity is she is so endlessly quotable and her numerous, beloved one-liners come from poems so good its almost a shame to highlight them without the full thing. She attended Ohio State University and Vassar College without finishing a degree, but once her first collection of poetry came out her career as a poet was well under way and she would later teach while working as a poet-in residence at several colleges before finishing her career as Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College. have you ever dared to pray,' and 'Tell me, what it is you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works.

It was tragic to lose her in 2019, right around the same time another giant of modern US poetry who also excelled at poetry harnessing the natural word, W.Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career. If you do not know this feeling in your body you will not be able to identify it purely from the mind. 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.

Featured, too, in Red Birds (2008) are Oliver’s thoughts about mortality, this life, amassing things, and chasing our ambitions. Her talent was recognised early and during her lifetime she won a host of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her collection American Primitive, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement.It is very nice to have selected poems from books not available as ebooks and those that are out of print: What Do We Know, The Leaf And The Cloud, White Pine, American Primitive, Twelve Moons, The River Styx, Ohio, and No Voyage. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. But for her fans—among whom I, unashamedly, count myself—it offers a welcome opportunity to consider her body of work as a whole. Here, for instance, we’re over halfway into this short poem before the wild geese which give the poem its title are even mentioned.