In Praise of Mary Oliver's Revelations

Ruth Franklin contributes a thoughtful article to the latest New Yorker about Mary Oliver's reputation among poetry scholars, readers, and the residents of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Franklin praises Oliver's new collection, Devotions (alongside previous shining emblems of her career), and notes that while "None of her books has received a full-length review in the Times," "she is often called the most beloved poet in America." Let's join Franklin and learn more about Oliver, starting there: 

Gwyneth Paltrow reads her, and so does Jessye Norman. Her poems are plastered all over Pinterest and Instagram, often in the form of inspirational memes. Cheryl Strayed used the final couplet of “The Summer Day,” probably Oliver’s most famous poem, as an epigraph to her popular memoir, “Wild”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Krista Tippett, interviewing Oliver for her radio show, “On Being,” referred to Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” which offers a consoling vision of the redemption possible in ordinary life, as “a poem that has saved lives.”

Oliver’s new book, “Devotions” (Penguin Press), is unlikely to change the minds of detractors. It’s essentially a greatest-hits compilation. But for her fans—among whom I, unashamedly, count myself—it offers a welcome opportunity to consider her body of work as a whole. Part of the key to Oliver’s appeal is her accessibility: she writes blank verse in a conversational style, with no typographical gimmicks. But an equal part is that she offers her readers a spiritual release that they might not have realized they were looking for. Oliver is an ecstatic poet in the vein of her idols, who include Shelley, Keats, and Whitman. She tends to use nature as a springboard to the sacred, which is the beating heart of her work. Indeed, a number of the poems in this collection are explicitly formed as prayers, albeit unconventional ones. As she writes in “The Summer Day”:

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.

The cadences are almost Biblical. “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” she urges elsewhere.

Read more at the New Yorker.