Devotions is a master collection of Mary Oliver’s poetry, collecting bits and pieces from other collections of her work over the course of her career, spanning from 1963 to 2015. This collection brought to mind the very little Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson I’ve read in her reverence for nature. This reverence of the natural world is what bound all of these poems into a more cohesive unit.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980. 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.' 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 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.While society has grown a little wiser to how the technologies can be exploited by foreign governments and boiler rooms spewing misinformation, the costs of allowing our attention to be commandeered remain drastically understated. It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs. 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 Growing up in Ohio, Oliver said in one of her rare interviews that she ‘ felt those first important connections, those first experiences being made with the natural world rather than with the social world.’ Perhaps for this reason much of her poetry uses the natural world as the lens through which she peers into the human heart and mind. At 17, Oliver would befriend Norma, the sister to poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and spend most of a decade organizing St. Vincent Millay’s papers while working for her estate. 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. Her collections are also highly decorated, winning the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive as well as the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems While at the St. Vincent Millay estate she would meet Molly Malone Cook, who would become her life-long partner as well as agent until Molly passed in 2005. Molly had previously owned a bookstore where she employed a young John Waters before he became a celebrated filmmaker and the couple maintained a friendship with him for the remainder of their lives. Though my favorite anecdote is that, while working as Mary’s agent, whenever a call came in for her, Molly would just pretend to be her on the phone and eventually editors just came to accept her as the same as actually speaking to Mary.

Also missing is Oliver’s darker work, the poems that don’t allow for consolation. “ Dream Work” (1986), her fifth and possibly her best book, comprises a weird chorus of disembodied voices that might come from nightmares, in poems detailing Oliver’s fear of her father and her memories of the abuse she suffered at his hands. The dramatic tension of that book derives from the push and pull of the sinister and the sublime, the juxtaposition of a poem about suicide with another about starfish. A similar dynamic is at work in “American Primitive,” which often finds the poet out of her comfort zone—in the ruins of a whorehouse, or visiting someone she loves in the hospital. More recently, “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac” ruminates on a diagnosis of lung cancer she received in 2012. “Do you need a prod? / Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” the poem asks. “Let me be as urgent as a knife, then.” Publishers Weekly, May 4, 1990, p. 62; August 10, 1992, p. 58; June 6, 1994, review of A Poetry Handbook, p. 62; October 31, 1994, review of White Pine, p. 54; August 7, 1995, review of Blue Pastures, p. 457; June 30, 1997, review of West Wind, p. 73; March 29, 1999, review of Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems, p. 100; August 28, 2000, review of The Leaf and the Cloud, p. 79; July 21, 2003, review of Owls and Other Fantasies, p. 188.Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. This review update is based on a selection of poems ‘From Blue Horses (2014)'. The eleven poems in this collection expressed the repose and comfort Oliver found in the natural world and quietly invited the reader to share her gratitude. She truly was a poet after the nature lover’s own heart. of her work fixated on subjects including identity, mortality, and nature, often blending these vital fascinations within the same poem: There is a thoughtful poem titled Storage on the joy of uncluttering. Below is a fitting response to ‘things’: In fact, I heard Oliver read her poems in a church, though not as part of a service. Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis, the Episcopal cathedral for the diocese of Missouri, decorated in purple tones for Advent, sponsored a poetry reading in December 2007. I remember a feeling of calmness, enhanced by the low lights of the church. Oliver, slight and dark-haired, read slowly and thoughtfully. Many of the poems centered around dogs (her 2013 collection is titled Dog Songs) or scenes from nature in and around Provincetown, Mass., where she lived with her life partner, Molly Malone Cook, for more than five decades..