You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves. [...]
The world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
From "Wild Geese";
Dream Work (1986)
Perhaps Mary Oliver's most well-known poem and the one that I read somewhere a few years ago and so it all began.
I bought New and Selected Poems Vol 1 in ...and Volume Two last year
But the more I read by Mary Oliver the more I have to have everything else she has written. And I need it yesterday. All I can think of is what is out there as yet unread by me, so when I came across a couple of more recent collections which didn't seem to feature in the two editions I already have I had ordered in a nano-second.
A Thousand Mornings and Blue Horses recently published for the first time in the UK (how has it taken so long) along with Upstream, a collection of essays.
An intensely private person who prefers to allow her work to speak for itself, there is not a lot to find out about Mary Oliver beyond the usual details of birth ( 10th September 1935) home ( Provincetown, Mass. and now Florida) love ( a partner of forty years Molly Malone Cook who died in 2005.)
Writing in the New York Times in 2009, Mary Duenwald suggests this...
'To follow in Ms. Oliver’s footsteps is not to power walk, but to stroll and stop often to take in sights and sounds and feelings. As she told an interviewer 15 years ago: “When things are going well, you know, the walk does not get rapid or get anywhere: I finally just stop, and write. That’s a successful walk!”
and somehow it is that intense feeling of 'taking in the sights' that shines through all the way to Devon as I open A Thousand Mornings and read the poem of the title...
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”
I pick up one or other of the Mary Oliver books each day and always but always she has something to say of relevance and meaning. If poetry's purpose is, amongst other very worthy things, to teach, to console and to warn, then Mary Oliver is winning the game in the consolation category. But she is not without her critics, indeed some of them may be among you, but for me Mary Oliver and my love for her writing transcends any concerns that others may have about her work. For me she says what I wish I could say but so often can't or for some reason don't.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
From "The summer day";
New and Selected Poems 1992
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