Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
I’ve been trying to use the library more this year, since I’m running out of space on my bookshelves, but I couldn’t resist buying this poetry collection. I read Mary Oliver’s Poetry Handbook a few years ago and loved it, but this is the first time I’ve really sat down with her work. Her writing is beautiful: lines that are refreshingly simple, and wonderfully rhythmic, like this one from ‘Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?’: ‘There are things you can’t reach. But / you can reach out to them’. And this from ‘Snow Geese’: ‘Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! / What a task / to ask / of anything, or anyone, / yet it is ours’.
There is a big focus on nature in Oliver’s poetry. Reading this collection reminds me of this quote from Einstein: ‘Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.’ There is a sense of searching for meaning in these poems, but that search often returns to the wonder and beauty of the natural world. This is where we find meaning: in the flight of a flock of snow geese, daisies, beans that ‘sit quietly inside their green pods’.
Many of these poems are about looking, really looking, at the world around us, and seeing things for what they are. I love these lines from ‘Mindful’: ‘It is what I was born for– / for look, to listen, / to lose myself / inside this soft world’. I’m trying to do this more in my own life. Instead of standing in a queue on my phone I’m standing in a queue noticing what’s around me. A man wearing a fedora. A dog tied up outside the supermarket. I’m paying closer attention to plants and animals, too. A bowerbird outside my front fence, a wombat on the track at night, cherry tomatoes growing wild in the bush. I’m hoping this practice will make my writing richer, but I’m noticing that it is making my life richer, as well. This is also the reason I keep coming back to poetry. I like the way it asks you to read it slowly, one line at a time, encouraging you to zoom in and focus on those little details.
There are lots of other ideas that resonate in this collection, like the rejection of busyness in ‘The Old Poets of China’ (‘Wherever I am, the world comes after me. / It offers me its busyness. It does not believe / that I do not want it’), and the questioning of our obsession with growth in ‘Meadowlark Sings and I Greet Him In Return’ (‘the terrible debris of progress’). I haven’t finished reading yet; I’m taking it slowly, one poem at a time. Pausing in-between to look out at my backyard and notice the trees swaying in the early autumn breeze.
Scraps & Fragments 