Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume One by Mary Oliver. 

5/5 rating.

Book #130!! of 2019. Read November 17, 2019.

I had read a few Mary Oliver Poems and enjoyed them enough to get this book: from that, I fell in love with her as a poet.

Mary has a beautiful, melodic way that she paints nature into her poems. Her lines on life are so perfect, all I can really do to show it is to give a few of my favorite quotes from this book. Go read this book! I usually am not a huge poetry person, but either she has changed that, or at least is one of those special poets who are an exception.

Quotes:

“And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead/

children out of the fields into the text/

of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better/

than the grass.”

“I have heard this music before,/

saith the body.”

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

“A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you

do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the

trees, or the laws which pertain to them.”

“A dog can never tell you what she knows from the

smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know

almost nothing.”

“and was happy, and why not?

Are not the difficult labors of our lives

full of dark hours?

And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far”

“I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.

I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.

I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling.

I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.”

“I watch her a little while, thinking:

what more could I do with wild words?

I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.

I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.”

“he headed, in long lunged and quick heaves,

straight to the nearest basin

of sweet black water and weeds,

and solitude -“

“They were here,

they were silent,

they are gone, having tasted

sheer terror.”

“Look! Look!

What is this dark death

that opens

like a white door?”

“or have you too

turned from this world –

or have you too

gone crazy

for power,

for things?”

“Look, I want to love this world

as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get

to be alive

and know it.”

“so this is the world.

I’m not in it.

It is beautiful.”

“‘Make of yourself a light,’

said the Buddha,

before he died.

I think of this every morning

as the east begins

to tear off its many clouds

of darkness, to send up the first

signal – a white fan

streaked with pink and violet,

even green.”

“And then I feel the sun itself

as it blazes over the hills,

like a million flowers on fire –

clearly I’m not needed,

yet I feel myself turning

into something of inexplicable value.”

“There is only one question:

how to love this world.”

“Of course! the path to heaven

doesn’t lie in flat miles.

It’s on the imagination

with which you perceive

this world,

and the gestures

with which you honor it.”

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

“I wanted

to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was

alive

for a little while.”

“But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do –

determined to save

the only life you could save.”

“Every morning I walk like this around

the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart

ever close, I am as good as dead.”

“The way I’d like to go on living in this world

wouldn’t hurt anything, I’d just go on

walking uphill and downhill, looking around,

and so what if half the time I don’t know

what for -“

“the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want

to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly

wild.”

“To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.”

“But you never know, traveling, around what bend

The dreams will curve to an end,

And what will happen then.”

“Let us risk the wildest places,

Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.”

“The broken year will make no change

Upon her wise and whirling heart; –

She knows how people always plan

To live their lives, and never do.”

“I would it were not so, but so it is.

Who ever made music of a mild day?”

“This is our failure, that in all the world

Only the stricken have learned how to grieve.”

IG Link.