Recommended reading - Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2020)

Devotions
The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

Published by Penguin Books.
Published 2020.

Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0399563261
ISBN-13: 9780399563263

Description:

Now a Read With Jenna Book Club Pick.

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.

“I love [Mary’s] work. It’s about nature and love and what it means to be human. . . . I find her poetry to be so cathartic and beautiful.” – Jenna Bush Hager.

“No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love.” – The Washington Post.

Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has 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, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years.

Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver’s work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

Born on this day – Mary Oliver:

Mary Oliver

Writer

September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019

Credits:

Poems:

At Black River; August; Banyan; Beside the Waterfall; Breakage; Death at a Great Distance; Death at Wind River; Every Morning; Fall; Forty Years; The Hermit Crab; Hummingbirds; In Malaysia; The Kingfisher; The Mango; Morning Glories; The Moths; The Owl; Pilot Snake; Rain; The Real Prayers Are Not the Words, But the Attention that Comes First; The Shark; Singapore; The Son; Song for Autumn; Spring; THE STORM; This Morning Again It Was in the Dusty Pines; The Waterfall; What Is It?; White-Eyes.

 

Books:
 

A Poetry Handbook; A Thousand Mornings; American Primitive; At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver (audio cd); Blue Horses; Blue Iris: Poems and Essays; Blue Pastures; Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver; Dog Songs; Dream Work; Evidence; Felicity; House of Light; Long Life: Essays and Other Writings; New and Selected Poems [volume one]; New and Selected Poems, volume two; No Voyage, and Other Poems; Our World with photographs by Molly Malone Cook; Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays; Provincetown; Red Bird; Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse; Sleeping in the Forest; Swan: Poems and Prose Poems; The Leaf and the Cloud; The Night Traveler; The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems; The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays; Thirst: Poems; Twelve Moons; Upstream: Selected Essays; West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems; What Do We Know; White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems; Why I Wake Early: New Poems; Wild geese: selected poems; Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems.

Mary Oliver, on writing:

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line.

I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down.

I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.

- Mary Oliver.