Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver
Books of Poetry (alphabetical).
Prose.
Editing.
Time Line.
Books.
Mary Oliver featured in:
Best American Poetry: 2006
(guest editor Billy Collins)
with "The Poet with His Face in His Hands".
Best American Poetry: 2000
(guest editor Rita Dove)
with "Work".
Best American Poetry: 1999
(guest editor Robert Bly)
with "Flare".
Best American Poetry: 1993
(guest editor Louise Glück) with
"Poppies".
Mary Oliver's tone relies heavily on the ecstatic and the shamanistic,
on the throwing of her consciousness into
various of the birds she writes about,
and returning to her page to tell us what they feel and think.
Use of the pathetic fallacy is so heavy
that at times it is gushy, predictable, routine, and boring.
She is more successful (as in examples below for
Owls and Other Fantasies)
when she gives herself distance as an observer and metaphor maker.
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American Primitive (1983)
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Blue Iris: Poems and Essays (2004)
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Dream Work (1986)
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House of Light (1990)
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Leaf and the Cloud, (The) (2000, prose poem)
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New and Selected Poems Volume One (1992)
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New and Selected Poems Volume Two (2005)
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Night Traveler, (The) (1978)
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No Voyage and Other Poems (1963, first edition; 1965, expanded edition)
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Her tone relies heavily on the ecstatic and the shamanistic,
on the throwing of her consciousness into
various of the birds she writes about,
and returning to her page to tell us what they feel and think.
Use of the pathetic fallacy is so heavy
that at times it is predictable, routine, and boring.
For me, Oliver is more successful as an observer and metaphor maker, as in the
glorious
"Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard",
whose (partial) opening stanza is:
His beak could open a bottle,
and his eyes [...]
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder --
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation.
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Similar success is in
"White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field",
whose center is:
so I thought:
maybe death
isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us --
as soft as feathers --
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Included poems that appeared earlier in her books:
and one poem ("White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field")
that was previously published only in:
Periodicals in which some poems appeared are:
- Appalachia
- Onearth
- Shenandoah
- The Southern Review
- Spirituality and Health
- Spiritus
The essay ("Owls")
first appeared in Orion
and was reprinted in
The Best American Essays 1996
and then in her own book:
One of her finest books. Favorite poems are many and include:
- "Both Worlds" (p. 51-52)
- "Eleven Versions of the Same Poem" (p. 66 onward)
- "Night and the River" (p. 8-9)
- "Night Herons" (p. 24)
- "Of the Empire"
- "Percy and Books (Eight)" (p. 29)
- "Red Bird" (p. 1)
- "Red Bird Explains Himself" (p. 78)
- "Self-Portrait" (p. 7)
- "Small Bodies" (p. 31), ending (and notice the interesting comma at the end of the
penultimate line):
Still, there are so many small bodies in the world,
for which I am afraid
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- "Sometimes", a multi-part poem starting on p. 35, and whose 4th part has these marvelous
"Instructions for living a life:"
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
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- "Straight Talk from a Fox " (p. 11)
- "Swimming, One Day in August" (p. 56)
- "Who Said This?" (p. 58)
Data:
- 61 poems (one poem is "Eleven Versions of the Same Poem"
but the book jacket includes each version in the count)
in a single section.
- 78 pages; about 1.3 pages per poem.
- Number of stanzas:
- 14 (23%) of the poems are written in a single stanza.
- 3 poems in 2-line stanzas.
- 8 poems in 3-line stanzas.
- 13 (21%) poems in 4-line stanzas.
- 1 sonnet-type poem.
- 22 (37%) poems in stanzas of variable (but usually six or fewer) lines.
- 15 (25%) poems take more than one page.
- The poems refer in traditional ways to the Christian God.
5 of the poems in a convenience sample of the first 10 poems in the book have
such references:
God, God-fearing, Lord-love, Maker of All Things, and the afterlife.
- The poems are rich in the senses. A convenience sample of the first 10 poems in the book has:
- Sight mentioned/implied on average 0.9 times per poem.
- Touch on average 0.8 times per poem.
- Sound on average 0.5 times per poem.
- Smell on average 0.4 times per poem.
- Taste on average 0.3 times per poem.
- Acknowledges prior publications in these journals (in most of which she is often published):
- Appalachia
- Bark
- Cape Cod Voice
- Five Points
- Onearth
- Orion
- Parabola
- Portland Magazine
- Reflections
- Shenandoah
- The Southern Review
- Spiritus
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River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems, (The) (1972)
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Dedication: "For Molly Malone Cook (1925-2005)".
A book of love and loss. Favorite poems include:
- "In the Storm" (p. 62-63)
- "Mozart, for Example" (p. 12)
- "Praying" (p. 37)
- "The Uses of Sorrow" (p. 52)
Data:
- 43 poems
in a single section with one
poem in an epilogue.
- 67 pages; about 1.6 pages per poem.
- Number of stanzas:
- 1 poem written in a single stanza.
- 1 poems in 2-line stanzas.
- 3 poems in 3-line stanzas.
- 12 (28%) poems in 4-line stanzas.
- 1 sonnet-type poem.
- 23 (53%) poems in stanzas of variable (but usually six or fewer) lines.
- 2 prose poems.
- 16 (37%) poems take more than one page.
- The poems refer in traditional ways to the Christian God.
2 of the poems in a convenience sample of the first 10 poems in the book have
such references:
God, dear God, the capitalized 'His'.
- The poems are rich in the senses. A convenience sample of the first 10 poems in the book has:
- Sight mentioned/implied on average 0.8 times per poem.
- Touch on average 0.8 times per poem.
- Sound on average 0.6 times per poem.
- Smell on average 0.3 times per poem.
- Taste on average 0.3 times per poem.
- Acknowledges prior publications in these journals (in most of which she is often published):
- America
- Appalachia
- Best Catholic Writing of 2006
- Cape Cod Voice
- Episcopal Times, Portland
- Five Points
- Nature and Spirituality
- Orion
- Shenandoah
- Spiritus
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Twelve Moons (1978)
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West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems (1997)
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What Do We Know (2002)
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White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems (1994)
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Good (in a Mary-Oliver way) but nothing spectacular.
Favorite poems include:
- "Clouds" (p. 22)
- "Freshen the Flowers, She Said" (p. 7)
- "Look Again" (p. 61).
- "Song of the Builders" (p. 60)
- "The Arrowhead" (p. 11)
- "This Worlds" (p. 27)
- "What Was Once the Largest Shopping Center in Northern Ohio Was Built Where There Had Been a Pond
I Used to Visit Every Summer Afternoon" (p. 36)
Data:
- 47 poems
in two sections: 30 in the first section and 17 in the second section.
- 67 pages (excluding blank pages and boiler plate); about 1.4 pages per poem.
- Number of stanzas:
- 5 (11%) of the poems are written in a single stanza.
- 0 poems in 2-line stanzas.
- 0 poems in 3-line stanzas.
- 16 (23%) (11 and 5) poems in 4-line stanzas.
- 28 (53%) (14 and 10) poems in verse paragraphs of variable size (but usually seven or fewer lines).
- 2 prose poems.
- 18 (34%) poems take more than one page.
- The poems are rich in the senses. A convenience sample of the first 10 poems in the book has:
- Sight mentioned/implied on average in 1.0 poems.
- Touch on average in 0.9 poems.
- Sound on average in 0.7 poems.
- Taste on average in 0.3 poems.
- Smell on average in 0.2 poems.
- Acknowledges prior publications in these journals:
- Cape Cod Voice
- Double Take
- Image
- The New Yorker
- Onearth (formerly Amicus)
- Oprah Magazine
- Poetry
- The Southern Review
- Spiritus
- Wilderness
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Blue Pastures (1995)
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A Poetry Handbook (1994)
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Winter hours: prose, prose poems, and poems (1999)
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Blog entry.
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- Part One: Essays and Poems.
From her "Once":
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What is autobiography anyway but a story rich and impossible of completion --
an intense, careful, expressive, self-interested failure?
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- Part Two: Four Poets. Essays on:
- Edgar Alan Poe.
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In this universe we are given two gifts:
the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions.
Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
This is Poe's real story.
And it is ours.
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[But] the later poems --
beginning with the volume West-Running Brook, say --
less commonly have that sense of a private man working at the conflicts in his life...
The poems become, in the later books, entertainments and pronouncements.
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despair, wed to fortitude[,] ... is the dense emotion at the center of Frost's work.
... He could not hear the trill of the trees without the cry of the roots.
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- Robert Frost.
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In the lyrical poems of Robert Frost there is almost always something wrong,
a dissatisfaction or distress.
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We are hearing two different messages:
everything is all right,
say the meter and the rhyme;
everything is not all right,
say the words.
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He writes about our own inescapable destiny.
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- Gerard Manley Hopkins.
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[A] poetry of rapture and pain, of the perfection of God
and the awkwardness and imperfection of the poet.
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- Walt Whitman.
[H]is was a sensibility so passionate, so affirmative and optimistic,
that it is fair to speak of him as writing out of a kind of hovering mystical cloud.
... "Song of Myself" is sprinkled with questions ...
More than sixty questions in all, and not one of them easily answerable.
Nor, indeed, are they presented for answers, but to force open the soul.
... It is supposed that a writer writes what he knows about knows well.
It is not necessarily so.
A writer's subject may just as well, if not more likely,
be what the writer longs for and dreams about, in an unquenchable dream,
in lush detail and harsh honesty.
... His message was clear from the first and never changed:
that a better, richer life is available to us.
... his methods are endlessly suggestive rather than demonstrative, and
... their main attempt was to move the reader toward response rather than reflection.
... Brawn and spirit, we are built of light, and God is within us.
This is the message of his long, honeyed harangue.
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- Part Three: Intermission of prose poems. Some tiny fragments, grouped as "Sand Dabs".
A longer prose poem (or essay?) on observing a spider hatch three broods and capture a cricket.
I am a performing artist; I perform admiration.
Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.
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- Part Four: "Winter hours" essay.
Excellent essay on who she is, as a writer, even though I am dubious that birds 'sing' in the wind:
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Morning, for me, is the time of best work.
My conscious thought sings like a bird in a cage,
but the rest of me is singing too,
like a bird in the wind.
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In the act of writing a poem
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[w]hat I hear is almost a voice,
almost a language.
It is a second ocean, rising,
singing in one's ear,
or deep inside the ears,
whispering in the recesses where one is less oneself than
a part of some single indivisible community.
Blake spoke of it as taking dictation.
I am no Blake, yet I know the nature of what he meant.
Every poet knows it.
One learns the craft, and then casts off.
One hopes for gifts.
One hopes for direction.
It is both physical and spooky.
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the first act of writing, for me, involves nothing more complicated than paper and pencil.
The abilities of a typewriter or computer would not help in this act
of slow and deep listening.
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Included poems that appeared earlier in her book:
Poems and essays were previously published in:
- Appalachia
- Green Mountains Review
- Ohio Review
- Poetry
- Poetry East
- Shenandoah
- Viginia Quarterly Review
The essay ("Building the House")
first appeared in Shenandoah
and was reprinted in
The Best American Essays 1990.
Best American Essays: 2009
- Editor for 2009 issue (series editor Robert Atwan).
- 2-page introduction.
- 187 pages, 22 essays, some as small as 2 pages; mean page length of 8.5 pages per essay.
- Pretty good collection thought many of the choices seem rather close to the editor's style.
- Favorites include:
- Sue Allison's prose-poem scant-page essay "Taking a Reading" (names of measurements).
- Wendell Berry's "Faustian Economics".
- Brian Doyle's 2-page "The Greatest Nature Essay Ever".
- Amy Leach's "You Be the Moon" (even if it's a little over-exuberant in its tropes).
- Jill McCorkle's "Cuss Time" (one of the of wisest parental essays).
- Ryan van Meter's "First".
- Jerald Walker's "The Mechanics of Being" on living with his two blind parents.
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- 1935.
- Born.
- 1963.
- Published
No Voyage and Other Poems (1963, first edition; 1965, expanded edition).
- 1972.
- Published
River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems, (The) (1972).
- 1978.
- Published
Night Traveler, (The) (1978).
- Published
Twelve Moons (1978).
- 1983.
- Published
American Primitive (1983).
- 1986.
- Published
Dream Work (1986).
- 1990.
- Published
House of Light (1990).
- 1992.
- Published
New and Selected Poems Volume One (1992).
- 1994.
- Published
White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems (1994).
- Published
A Poetry Handbook (1994).
- 1995.
- Published
Blue Pastures (1995).
- 1997.
- Published
West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems (1997).
- 1999.
- Published
Winter hours: prose, prose poems, and poems (1999).
- 2000.
- Published
Leaf and the Cloud, (The) (2000, prose poem).
- 2002.
- Published
What Do We Know (2002).
- 2003.
- Published
Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays (2003).
- 2004.
- Published
Why I Wake Early (2004).
- Published
Blue Iris: Poems and Essays (2004).
- 2005.
- Published
New and Selected Poems Volume Two (2005).
- 2006.
- Published
Thirst (2006).
- 2008.
- Published
Red Bird (2008).
- One of 48 women poets in
100 essential modern poems by women:
- 2009.
- Edited
Best American Essays: 2009.
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