Book Review: "New and Selected Poems: Volume One" by Mary Oliver

New and Collected Poems, Volume One (1992)
Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
255 pages

My first introduction to the amazing poetry of Mary Oliver was through her interview on Krista Tippett’s wonderful program, On Being (which I listen to as a podcast – don’t miss the unedited versions!).  Along with the interview, Tippett’s feed includes posts of Oliver reading several of her poems. Listening to these various sessions reveal Oliver to have developed a profound connection to the natural world and, from that, insight into how such a connection can inform – as Tippett so often discusses with her guests – what it means to be human.

In the interview, Oliver describes spending hours upon hours wandering through the countryside to immerse herself in nature, with paper and pencil in hand to capture the revelations and reflections she has along the way. Her readings of her poetry left me eager for more, and I decided to begin with her collection New and Selected Poems: Volume One.

Published in 1992, the book has a selection from the first three decades of Oliver’s work, plus another thirty poems that had not yet been published. Interestingly, the poems are grouped in reverse chronological order, so that reading them sequentially from the beginning has the effect of peeling back on Oliver’s evolving understanding of our place in the world.

She seems to capture the core of her experience in a brief stanza of The Moth: 

If you notice anything,
it leads you to notice
more
and more. (132) 

Open our eyes and our consciousness to our surroundings, she suggests, and we’ll suddenly become aware of the vast richness of the world before us.

The image of Oliver carrying pencil and paper on her walks into nature to capture moments in notes that later become poems powerfully colors the reading of many of the pieces in this collection. We find Oliver writing not about nature, but rather about her observations and experience living within it – its rituals and its pace – as in One or Two Things 

The butterfly’s loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of flowers and black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower. (120)

Many of her poems point to the need to slow down and appreciate all that nature offers, both in terms of marvels as well as an understanding about living. As she herself found in her own early life, people often struggle to look past daily concerns, to differentiate what is needed from what is desired, and so pass by nature largely unawares. In that vein, she asks us in The Sun: 

do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed –
or have you too
turned from this world –

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things? (51)

Instead of giving in, then, to the often-damaging distraction of such human striving, she calls for a more contemplative embrace of nature, one that can guide us on what the poet David Whyte has referred to as our pilgrimage through life. Writing of her own longing for such a deep openness to the world, Oliver imagines in Entering the Kingdom: 

The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees –
To learn something by being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention. (190)

This kind of clear seeing of nature, she finds, can teach us how to take the critical step toward equanimity. Instead of anthropomorphizing animals – projecting our human striving and planning and regrets onto them – we can discover them as they are, learn how they simply live life as it comes to them. Thus, in The Turtle, she writes of watching a mother laying eggs in some mudflats: 

and then you realize a greater thing –
she doesn’t consider
what she was born to do.
She’s only filled
with an old blind wish. (123)

What Oliver discovers in nature reflects an ancient contemplative tradition, the idea that we, as humans, can quiet our minds by recognizing ourselves as at base a consciousness experiencing the world – not directing our life, but receiving it. Her view touches close up upon the recognition of the illusory nature of human free will, a view she seems to not only embrace but long for in Roses, Late Summer: 

If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn’t mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question. (96)

In her collection New and Selected Poems: Volume One, Mary Oliver creates exquisite portraits of the natural world. More importantly, however, she shares through her poetry an invitation to seek out nature, to pass through it slowly, deliberately, and perhaps find a path away from the hectic lives to which we too often feel chained. Heed her call to wander out into whatever natural space you can find, with a mind open to the wonders that await, and you may begin to discover for yourself what it means to be human.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
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