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American Primitive
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Her most acclaimed volume of poetry, American Primitive contains fifty visionary poems about nature, the humanity in love, and the wilderness of America, both within our bodies and outside.
"American Primitive enchants me with the purity of its lyric voice, the loving freshness of its perceptions, and the singular glow of a spiritual life brightening the pages." -- Stanley Kunitz
"These poems are natural growths out of a loam of perception and feeling, and instinctive skill with language makes them seem effortless. Reading them is a sensual delight." -- May Swenson
Her most acclaimed volume of poetry, American Primitive contains fifty visionary poems about nature, the humanity in love, and the wilderness of America, both within our bodies and outside.
"American Primitive enchants me with the purity of its lyric voice, the loving freshness of its perceptions, and the singular glow of a spiritual life brightening the pages." -- Stanley Kunitz
"These poems are natural growths out of a loam of perception and feeling, and instinctive skill with language makes them seem effortless. Reading them is a sensual delight." -- May Swenson
88 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
197 people are currently reading
7598 people want to read
About the author
Mary Oliver
104 books8,756 followersMary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 729 reviews
March 28, 2016
I close my eyes and it's not difficult to imagine Mary Oliver waking up right before dawn to open the window shutters of her house in Provincetown and wait for the sun to trace its slothful arch while waiting for words to come.
Words. Words that indeed do come; in deluges, in hasty frenzy, flooding the black tip of her charcoal pencil to fill her notebook and the hearts of countess wistful readers.
Words that draw a picture of the natural world by a keen, careful observer of the small wonders that occur every day for those who have the patience to see beyond the prosaic facts of the quotidian.
Oliver's clearly delineated stanzas represent a paean to life, nature and to conscious acceptance of the unfathomable mysteries and contradictions of existence. Her naturalistic sensibilities are reminiscent of Emerson or Whitman, but there is an inimitable gentleness in the texture of Oliver’s verses that distinguishes her from other "praise poets".
In her probing questions, one may find answers, but also a reaffirmed conviction that allows wonder and gratefulness to coexist rather than to be at odds. There is genuine devotion for "mother earth", for one can tell that Oliver's "work is loving the world" in the hymns that she sings to the heron gliding over the still pond, the fox in the leafy shrubbery or the sunflower seeking for guidance in the cerulean sky, but not the sort of puritan adoration more typical of religious worshiping. Oliver's poems brim over with passionate, carnal sensuality that is not edulcorated or tamed down by conventional standards.
“How shall I touch you
unless it is
everywhere?”
The Gardens
The spirituality of Oliver's poetry is without temple or creed. It doesn't leave anybody out. Both the believers and godless, the apathetic and fervent, the skeptical and unsuspicious are equally summoned by the sheer hopefulness of her meditative verses, whose melody invokes that of a latitudinarian prayer that beseeches us to make peace with grief and to embrace our identity with all its razor-sharp edges.
“What should we say
is the truth of the world?
The miles alone
in the pinched dark?
or the push of the promise?
or the wound of delight?”
The bobcat
A fertile question to greet the world with every morning, like Mary does.
Her lyrical chants teach us something that is very simple but extraordinary at once: that poetry is a spiritual activity that generates an immense pleasure because it stops one dead on his tracks; only to start walking again with renewed vision. To look at the world under the spell of poetry is to carry out an exercise of utmost respect towards all things, in all their forms, even the ones that ceased to be, because they become perennial through the power of condensed art in minimalistic expression.
And so after the frosty night, after the utter darkness, the sound of promise may rise again with the sun, and the loud roar of the river and the chirping of birds will tone down the unnerving humming of doubts and uncertainty, soothed by restorative stanzas that take the edge off the inconsistencies of life.
May that be so for those who raise their faces towards the morning sunbeams and its silent glories.
Words. Words that indeed do come; in deluges, in hasty frenzy, flooding the black tip of her charcoal pencil to fill her notebook and the hearts of countess wistful readers.
Words that draw a picture of the natural world by a keen, careful observer of the small wonders that occur every day for those who have the patience to see beyond the prosaic facts of the quotidian.
Oliver's clearly delineated stanzas represent a paean to life, nature and to conscious acceptance of the unfathomable mysteries and contradictions of existence. Her naturalistic sensibilities are reminiscent of Emerson or Whitman, but there is an inimitable gentleness in the texture of Oliver’s verses that distinguishes her from other "praise poets".
In her probing questions, one may find answers, but also a reaffirmed conviction that allows wonder and gratefulness to coexist rather than to be at odds. There is genuine devotion for "mother earth", for one can tell that Oliver's "work is loving the world" in the hymns that she sings to the heron gliding over the still pond, the fox in the leafy shrubbery or the sunflower seeking for guidance in the cerulean sky, but not the sort of puritan adoration more typical of religious worshiping. Oliver's poems brim over with passionate, carnal sensuality that is not edulcorated or tamed down by conventional standards.
“How shall I touch you
unless it is
everywhere?”
The Gardens
The spirituality of Oliver's poetry is without temple or creed. It doesn't leave anybody out. Both the believers and godless, the apathetic and fervent, the skeptical and unsuspicious are equally summoned by the sheer hopefulness of her meditative verses, whose melody invokes that of a latitudinarian prayer that beseeches us to make peace with grief and to embrace our identity with all its razor-sharp edges.
“What should we say
is the truth of the world?
The miles alone
in the pinched dark?
or the push of the promise?
or the wound of delight?”
The bobcat
A fertile question to greet the world with every morning, like Mary does.
Her lyrical chants teach us something that is very simple but extraordinary at once: that poetry is a spiritual activity that generates an immense pleasure because it stops one dead on his tracks; only to start walking again with renewed vision. To look at the world under the spell of poetry is to carry out an exercise of utmost respect towards all things, in all their forms, even the ones that ceased to be, because they become perennial through the power of condensed art in minimalistic expression.
And so after the frosty night, after the utter darkness, the sound of promise may rise again with the sun, and the loud roar of the river and the chirping of birds will tone down the unnerving humming of doubts and uncertainty, soothed by restorative stanzas that take the edge off the inconsistencies of life.
May that be so for those who raise their faces towards the morning sunbeams and its silent glories.
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April 22, 2024
‘Whatever it is you try to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you like the dreams of your body’
I’ve always found that the world outside my window, deep in the immersion of nature, is where I feel most alive and at peace. I love to travel into the wild woods of Michigan, off from the beaten path, and lose myself among the trees. I look up and feel dwarfed and insignificant among the leafy giants that stretch towards the limitless sky, and allow the breeze to blow through me, taking my worldly thoughts away with its passing. Sometimes it feels as if I could just dissolve from my physical form, meld with nature, and become counted among the countless trees and plants. Perhaps this is the primitive animal instinct in us all, calling us back to simplicity. The pristine beauty of Mary Oliver’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection, American Primitive, is the voice of this wild world and celebrates the unity of the animals and Earth. Her words are a trek through the seasons, a nature walk of words across meadows and streams and deep into the mysterious forests of our hearts.
Oliver has a gift to bestow all the sounds, smells and feelings of the wilderness through mere words. You will feel the drops of rain, hear the babbling brook, and watch the animals scurry about all within a white page. She harnesses the rhythm of nature, from winding rivers to the sight of two snakes slithering through a field of flowers ‘like a matched team / like a dance / like a love affair’. Poems such as Bobcat use the form of the poem to reflect the darting movement of the beast across the land, or to elevate the imagery of waves in The Sea. The language is always simple, yet intensely eloquent.
All four seasons are accounted for within this volume. Her poems of the Ohio winters hit close to home, detailing the muted silence of a snow covered night, beneath a starless sky such as in First Snow:
whence such beauty and what
the meaning
There are the blossoming poems of spring, bringing us rain ‘soft as lilacs and clean as holy water’, and the glorious warmth of summer.
While much of the works are directed towards the blooming and buzzing of life, the river of her poems travel to darker territories at times where the land reclaims the living. The poem The Kitten, about a stillborn cat, is particularly moving:
There it the fall poetry of the falling leaves and dying warmth, and the wet smell of damp decay rises up from sweet stanzas to fill your nose. I once worked at a large park and was lucky to spend my summers surrounded by miles and miles of wilderness. This collection really brings back the joy from those times, yet one poem in particular hits close to home. Something mentions a man who goes into nature to end his life, which is something that commonly happened at this park as well and her words brings back the unshakable memory of an early morning discovering a swinging form engulfed by the rising sun. From the earth we came, and to the earth we will return.
If you love nature, or poetry, or just good writing in general, do yourself a favor and introduce yourself to the poems of Mary Oliver. She gives Robert Frost a good rival with American Primitive, and upon reading it you will most likely find yourself lacing up your shoes and setting forth into the woods with a new found synergy with the rhythm of the wild. I highly suggest you do so. And now, nature calls and I must go.
5/5
Fall Song
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
from the particular island
of this summer, this now, that now is nowhere
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
I’ve always found that the world outside my window, deep in the immersion of nature, is where I feel most alive and at peace. I love to travel into the wild woods of Michigan, off from the beaten path, and lose myself among the trees. I look up and feel dwarfed and insignificant among the leafy giants that stretch towards the limitless sky, and allow the breeze to blow through me, taking my worldly thoughts away with its passing. Sometimes it feels as if I could just dissolve from my physical form, meld with nature, and become counted among the countless trees and plants. Perhaps this is the primitive animal instinct in us all, calling us back to simplicity. The pristine beauty of Mary Oliver’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection, American Primitive, is the voice of this wild world and celebrates the unity of the animals and Earth. Her words are a trek through the seasons, a nature walk of words across meadows and streams and deep into the mysterious forests of our hearts.
Oliver has a gift to bestow all the sounds, smells and feelings of the wilderness through mere words. You will feel the drops of rain, hear the babbling brook, and watch the animals scurry about all within a white page. She harnesses the rhythm of nature, from winding rivers to the sight of two snakes slithering through a field of flowers ‘like a matched team / like a dance / like a love affair’. Poems such as Bobcat use the form of the poem to reflect the darting movement of the beast across the land, or to elevate the imagery of waves in The Sea. The language is always simple, yet intensely eloquent.
All four seasons are accounted for within this volume. Her poems of the Ohio winters hit close to home, detailing the muted silence of a snow covered night, beneath a starless sky such as in First Snow:
Its whitewhy, how
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to
whence such beauty and what
the meaning
There are the blossoming poems of spring, bringing us rain ‘soft as lilacs and clean as holy water’, and the glorious warmth of summer.
There is no end,
believe me! To the inventions of summer,
to the happiness you body
is willing to bear
While much of the works are directed towards the blooming and buzzing of life, the river of her poems travel to darker territories at times where the land reclaims the living. The poem The Kitten, about a stillborn cat, is particularly moving:
But instead I took it out into the field
and opened the earth
and put it back
saying, it was real
saying, life is infinitely inventive
saying, what other amazements
lie in the dark seed of the earth, yes
I think I did right to go out alone
And give it back peacefully, and cover the place
With the reckless blossoms of weeds
There it the fall poetry of the falling leaves and dying warmth, and the wet smell of damp decay rises up from sweet stanzas to fill your nose. I once worked at a large park and was lucky to spend my summers surrounded by miles and miles of wilderness. This collection really brings back the joy from those times, yet one poem in particular hits close to home. Something mentions a man who goes into nature to end his life, which is something that commonly happened at this park as well and her words brings back the unshakable memory of an early morning discovering a swinging form engulfed by the rising sun. From the earth we came, and to the earth we will return.
If you love nature, or poetry, or just good writing in general, do yourself a favor and introduce yourself to the poems of Mary Oliver. She gives Robert Frost a good rival with American Primitive, and upon reading it you will most likely find yourself lacing up your shoes and setting forth into the woods with a new found synergy with the rhythm of the wild. I highly suggest you do so. And now, nature calls and I must go.
5/5
Fall Song
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
from the particular island
of this summer, this now, that now is nowhere
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
April 5, 2020
American Primitive, Mary Oliver’s Pulitizer Prize winning collection, is essential reading for anyone who cares about American poetry. Moreover, it well deserves the Pulitzer, which is more than I can say for many of the books that have won this coveted prize.
Now I’m not knocking the Pulitizer. But it seems to me that book awards—and poetry book awards in particular—are never quite on the cutting edge, but always trying to catch up. They give awards to the author who deserved the award for his last book, but didn’t get it then.
Not this time, however. American Primitive (1983), published in Oliver’s 48th year, was the collection in which Mary Oliver gathered her considerable talents together. Oh, she had come close before, particularly in her previous collection Twelve Moons (1979). In that book, she always sounds like herself (never like Millay or Mew, or Wendell Berry, for example), but in Primitive she also discovers how to make her personal self—Mary Oliver—part of the nature she describes and loves so well. I don’t mean these poems are in anyway confessional; no, far from it. Each one is a precise, well-observed evocation of nature. Yet each is a passionate utterance by the person Mary Oliver too.
Here are three examples. I could have chosen many fine poems, but I picked them because I liked all of them and they are all short:
AUGUST
When the blackberries hang
swollen in the wooods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.
THE KITTEN
More amazed than anything
I took the perfectly black
stillborn kitten
with the one large eye
in the center of its small forehead
from the house cat’s bed
and buried it in a field
behind the house.
I suppose I could have given it
to a museum,
I could have called the local
newspaper.
But instead I took it out into the field
and opened the earth
and put it back
saying, it was real,
saying, life is infinitely inventive,
saying, what other amazements
like in the dark seed of the earth, yes,
I think I did right to go out alone
and give it back peacefully, and cover the place
with the reckless blossoms of weeds.
SPRING
I lift my face to the pale flowers
of the rain. They’re soft as linen,
clean as holy water. Meanwhile
my dog runs off, noses down packed leaves
into damp, mysterious tunnels.
He says the smells are rising now full of oil,
sleep sweat, tag-ends of dreams. The rain
rubs its shining hands all over me.
My dog returns and barks fiercely, he says
each secret body is the richest advisor,
deep in the black earth such fuming
nuggets of joy!
Read
November 4, 2021*i don’t rate poetry collections* trying to beat my slump with some poetry, and of course mary oliver is my go to. not my favorite collection but of course i still have nothing bad to say!!!! favorites : blossom, humpbacks, in the black water woods, and the lost children. (i’ll probably come back and reread as soon as this slump is over and will enjoy it better)
March 2, 2022
Nature is the theme uniting this well-crafted, beautiful and majestic collection of poems from one of my favorite poets. Mary transcends the physical world by in essence being One with that world. Sometimes her ability to do that is disconcerting. While this was not my favorite collection of hers (poetry is felt on such a personal level) these are remarkable poems indeed. Notably
Moles, John Chapman, Tasting the Wild Grapes, The Honey Tree, A Meeting, Postcards from Flamingo, Vultures, An Old Whorehouse, Rain in Ohio, Skunk Cabbage, The Fish, Humpbacks, The Roses, Blackberries, In Blackwater Woods, The Plum Trees....
I could probably go on.....
But I especially loved First Snow. I'm always trying to capture (somehow) the feeling into words-of what feels like the experience of the feeling of snow, and more specifically the first snow of the season. And Ms. Oliver does it. Ah, thank you! It's something magical-the first snow!-and part of what makes me glad that I live in the North.
"The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles, nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain — not a single
answer has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one."
Moles, John Chapman, Tasting the Wild Grapes, The Honey Tree, A Meeting, Postcards from Flamingo, Vultures, An Old Whorehouse, Rain in Ohio, Skunk Cabbage, The Fish, Humpbacks, The Roses, Blackberries, In Blackwater Woods, The Plum Trees....
I could probably go on.....
But I especially loved First Snow. I'm always trying to capture (somehow) the feeling into words-of what feels like the experience of the feeling of snow, and more specifically the first snow of the season. And Ms. Oliver does it. Ah, thank you! It's something magical-the first snow!-and part of what makes me glad that I live in the North.
"The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles, nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain — not a single
answer has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one."
July 14, 2013
So after years of teaching "Crossing the Swamp" and really coming to love it, I last year made an annotation for myself on my very own copy of the poem that I found this May: "Why the fuck aren't you reading more Mary Oliver?" Since I always take my own vituperative and vulgar advice, I picked up this collection.
And now I know why I don't read more Mary Oliver.
Take this example as indicative. Here's my favorite of her poems in this collection:
The Fish
The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows.
Nice, right? That "lie down/ quiet" rejected by the flailing and sucking of life refusing to let go as life so often does, the "amazement" of the air, and this transmutation as the fish dissolves/evolves into liquid rainbows. That's nature poetry I can get behind. And while I admit there's a good bit of the "wrenching things awry" Richard Wilbur rails against in "Praise in Summer" (one of my favorite poems that I refuse to allow to hijack this review for too long), this--comparatively--doesn't seem like a gross manipulation of the natural image. The liquid rainbows are a bit magical, a bit idealized, but we all know or should know that there's something liquid about the glimmer of fish scales. It's not a huge leap but a natural truth I know well very nicely phrased. It's a damn fine little poem.
Of course, Mary can't leave it alone. The poem doesn't end there. It continues (with no stanza breaks):
Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.
Really!? Really with the overt Oneness? Really with the inextricability and the euphemized death? "[N]ourished by the mystery"? Can't you just leave well the hell alone, Maria? Must we leap into natural fantasy? This pedantic, new-agey aggression will not stand, man, and it's all over this collection. Bluefish become "angels". Climbing up the Chagrin River she finds the "timeless castles/ of emerald eddies". Two perfectly described snakes "like two black whips/ lifting and dashing forward;/ in perfect concert" by poem's end travel "like a dance/ like a love affair." This last is the most infuriating because she has again busted a perfectly lovely poem with what need not be said. Present the image and let it work upon the reader. Leave us something to do.
Mary Oliver has mad chops. She has a fabulous ear (click that "Crossing the Swamp" link if you haven't and read it aloud), solid metrics, and she often finds images that grip and connect. I know I'm not being entirely fair when I ask her to serve effectively as a conveyor rather than an interpreter of the natural world, but I ask it nonetheless.
In short, this collection is just good enough to make me angry that it's not better.
And now I know why I don't read more Mary Oliver.
Take this example as indicative. Here's my favorite of her poems in this collection:
The Fish
The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows.
Nice, right? That "lie down/ quiet" rejected by the flailing and sucking of life refusing to let go as life so often does, the "amazement" of the air, and this transmutation as the fish dissolves/evolves into liquid rainbows. That's nature poetry I can get behind. And while I admit there's a good bit of the "wrenching things awry" Richard Wilbur rails against in "Praise in Summer" (one of my favorite poems that I refuse to allow to hijack this review for too long), this--comparatively--doesn't seem like a gross manipulation of the natural image. The liquid rainbows are a bit magical, a bit idealized, but we all know or should know that there's something liquid about the glimmer of fish scales. It's not a huge leap but a natural truth I know well very nicely phrased. It's a damn fine little poem.
Of course, Mary can't leave it alone. The poem doesn't end there. It continues (with no stanza breaks):
Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.
Really!? Really with the overt Oneness? Really with the inextricability and the euphemized death? "[N]ourished by the mystery"? Can't you just leave well the hell alone, Maria? Must we leap into natural fantasy? This pedantic, new-agey aggression will not stand, man, and it's all over this collection. Bluefish become "angels". Climbing up the Chagrin River she finds the "timeless castles/ of emerald eddies". Two perfectly described snakes "like two black whips/ lifting and dashing forward;/ in perfect concert" by poem's end travel "like a dance/ like a love affair." This last is the most infuriating because she has again busted a perfectly lovely poem with what need not be said. Present the image and let it work upon the reader. Leave us something to do.
Mary Oliver has mad chops. She has a fabulous ear (click that "Crossing the Swamp" link if you haven't and read it aloud), solid metrics, and she often finds images that grip and connect. I know I'm not being entirely fair when I ask her to serve effectively as a conveyor rather than an interpreter of the natural world, but I ask it nonetheless.
In short, this collection is just good enough to make me angry that it's not better.
June 24, 2007
Mary Oliver is so fucking cool and badass. You get the feeling reading this that she'd be great to have as a camping buddy, or backing you up in battle. The poems are all tactile earthy nature and sinewy arms ripping into mud kind of gnarlyness and make you want to run outside and shove dirt in your mouth.
April 19, 2019
4.5
I love Mary Oliver’s poetry. This is the fourteenth collection of hers I’ve read and it’s everything I’ve come to expect when reading her words (though her earlier poetry is distinctly different from the majority of her work). Oliver won the Pulitzer with this collection and it’s easy to see why: she writes simply but deftly, and each poem is impactful.
Most poems focus on the nature around Oliver, around us. The beauty, the fierceness, the life, the death, the wildness, the love, the horror, the stillness, the trepidation that sits in front of us right outside our front doors. It’s all right there and Oliver urges us to experience it. There’s something to be learned within every step of the woods, with every babble of the stream, within every small death that feels so grand and almost too much.
There’s an obvious connection to Transcendentalism here, and while I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of Thoreau and Emerson (Whitman’s great, though), I think Oliver taps into their groundwork and presents a modern take on self-reliance and one’s place with nature. It’s also a take I greatly prefer. With her passing earlier this year, I’ve finally gotten around to reading this monumental work, and I think everyone should read it at some point. And since it’s the tail end of poetry month, I hope to read her last collection “Devotions” (2017) as well.
I love Mary Oliver’s poetry. This is the fourteenth collection of hers I’ve read and it’s everything I’ve come to expect when reading her words (though her earlier poetry is distinctly different from the majority of her work). Oliver won the Pulitzer with this collection and it’s easy to see why: she writes simply but deftly, and each poem is impactful.
Most poems focus on the nature around Oliver, around us. The beauty, the fierceness, the life, the death, the wildness, the love, the horror, the stillness, the trepidation that sits in front of us right outside our front doors. It’s all right there and Oliver urges us to experience it. There’s something to be learned within every step of the woods, with every babble of the stream, within every small death that feels so grand and almost too much.
There’s an obvious connection to Transcendentalism here, and while I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of Thoreau and Emerson (Whitman’s great, though), I think Oliver taps into their groundwork and presents a modern take on self-reliance and one’s place with nature. It’s also a take I greatly prefer. With her passing earlier this year, I’ve finally gotten around to reading this monumental work, and I think everyone should read it at some point. And since it’s the tail end of poetry month, I hope to read her last collection “Devotions” (2017) as well.
January 18, 2019
RIP, Mary Oliver, 1/17/19
Wild Geese
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.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
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.
Wild Geese
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.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
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.
February 7, 2016
Mary Oliver's poems should be read in the morning when the birds have first awakened, or by a woodstove on a cold winter's day with the wind blowing through the wind chimes outside your door, or even before sitting in meditation. These poems may quiet your mind or just make you feel blessed to have even read them.
Her poems take you into the beauty of a wild swamp where alligators recite their poetry and to the sadness of a kitten that was born dead, as she gives it softly back to the earth. You walk with her in the spring and in the summer woods to listen to the robins and the crows, and then you walk with her through a whorehouse where spiders have spun their webs in the chandelier. The vultures are dark butterflies that live on the dead, and the white egrets fly like showers of fire.
Her poetry brings you the spirituality in all things and even transcends it as she takes you to meet God, even if you are not aware that one exists.
One poems haunts me, "The Lost Children." This is only the first half:
"In southern Ohio,
a long time ago,
Lydia Osborn, aged eleven, left
her younger sister
on the path and headed after
some straying cows, and did not
return.
Seven days a search was made; men
from Ohio and Kentucky tramped
the darkness, miles
of underbrush and trees.
They found where she'd slept,
under two fallen trees, and eaten
fox grapes and other berries.
The searchers went on into
the darkness. On the fifteenth day they found
footprints by a stream;
nearby, a blackberry path, and near that
a small house built of sticks,
with a little door, and a roof of green moss.
Inside, a tiny bed of leaves and more moss,
wild flowers
scattered over it..."
And she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
More of the true story of Lydia Osborn: http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/...
Her poems take you into the beauty of a wild swamp where alligators recite their poetry and to the sadness of a kitten that was born dead, as she gives it softly back to the earth. You walk with her in the spring and in the summer woods to listen to the robins and the crows, and then you walk with her through a whorehouse where spiders have spun their webs in the chandelier. The vultures are dark butterflies that live on the dead, and the white egrets fly like showers of fire.
Her poetry brings you the spirituality in all things and even transcends it as she takes you to meet God, even if you are not aware that one exists.
One poems haunts me, "The Lost Children." This is only the first half:
"In southern Ohio,
a long time ago,
Lydia Osborn, aged eleven, left
her younger sister
on the path and headed after
some straying cows, and did not
return.
Seven days a search was made; men
from Ohio and Kentucky tramped
the darkness, miles
of underbrush and trees.
They found where she'd slept,
under two fallen trees, and eaten
fox grapes and other berries.
The searchers went on into
the darkness. On the fifteenth day they found
footprints by a stream;
nearby, a blackberry path, and near that
a small house built of sticks,
with a little door, and a roof of green moss.
Inside, a tiny bed of leaves and more moss,
wild flowers
scattered over it..."
And she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
More of the true story of Lydia Osborn: http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/...
November 29, 2017
In the brutal elegance of citiesI never tire of Oliver's poems. I've been reading this collection, in particular, over and over again since it was first published in 1984. Whole lines of beautiful poetry and their accompanying dreamlike images are woven through my life thanks to Mary Oliver's shared vision of our world.
I have walked down
the halls of hotels
and heard this music
behind shut doors.
(from Music)
Now you are dead too, and I, no longer young,
know what a kiss is worth. Time
has made his pitch, the slow
speech that goes on and on,
reasonable and bloodless. Yet over
the bed of each of us moonlight
throws down her long hair until
one must have something.
Anything. This
or that, or something else:
the dark wound
of watching.
(from Something)
Listen, whatever it is you tryAh, she dazzles me!
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-white bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.
(from Humpbacks)
June 20, 2016
I don’t know if you have ever seen it, or at least heard of it, but there’s a rather famous sculpture of a naked woman bleeding light through the cracks on her body. The piece is called Expansion and is from the talented Paige Bradley. As I read American Primitive by Mary Oliver, my brain apparently couldn’t help but connect the two.
Mary Oliver acknowledges the cracks. Instead of seeing them as something that makes us flawed though, she seems to celebrate them for allowing the light to shine through. For her, every moment is a matter of perspective. It all comes down to us, to the way we choose to interpret what our eyes fall upon. She seems to find splendor at every corner.
We might all be walking around with our eyes open, but Mary Oliver sees. I couldn’t be more grateful for her poetry. It feels as if she is lending us her senses, as if she is tempting us with her senses – go out and see for yourself, it’s beautiful, even when it hurts.
One detail that appears to be more evident in American Primitive is Mary Oliver’s gift for creating certain textures with her words that are beyond palpable. It’s quite an experience.
If I were to describe American Primitive in one word, I believe I would go with feathers. They are soft to the touch and yet together they cover wings that lift bodies into the sky.
“and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain – not a single
answer has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.”
Mary Oliver acknowledges the cracks. Instead of seeing them as something that makes us flawed though, she seems to celebrate them for allowing the light to shine through. For her, every moment is a matter of perspective. It all comes down to us, to the way we choose to interpret what our eyes fall upon. She seems to find splendor at every corner.
“But we were fourteen
and no way dust could hide
the expected glamour from us,
or teach us anything.”
We might all be walking around with our eyes open, but Mary Oliver sees. I couldn’t be more grateful for her poetry. It feels as if she is lending us her senses, as if she is tempting us with her senses – go out and see for yourself, it’s beautiful, even when it hurts.
“there is no end,
believe me! to the inventions of summer,
to the happiness your body
is willing to bear.”
One detail that appears to be more evident in American Primitive is Mary Oliver’s gift for creating certain textures with her words that are beyond palpable. It’s quite an experience.
If I were to describe American Primitive in one word, I believe I would go with feathers. They are soft to the touch and yet together they cover wings that lift bodies into the sky.
October 12, 2010
I seem to be one of the only people on Goodreads who isn't head-over-heels in love with this book. I thought it was strong, solid nature poetry, but without that extra dimension that makes me love poets like Robert Frost and Annie Dillard - writers who can get you so wrapped up in a completely mundane scene that you don't even see it coming when they hit you with some profound, metaphysical truth. Mary Oliver has a wonderful way with words, but she doesn't take you anywhere beyond the scene. I found it easy to slide through her poems and rarely found things to pull me back in or make me want to re-read a line.
January 6, 2020
5 stars.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1984.
This collection of 50 pastoral poems is about as good as I’ve read — particularly if you have a childlike wonder for the natural world.
Oliver’s poetry is conventional and clear. She makes heavy use of familiar images to evoke nostalgia. She was one of the most popular poets of the past half century and hailed from the suburbs of Cleveland Ohio.
Here is one of my favorite poems from the American Primitive collection about Johnny Appleseed.
John Chapman
He wore a tin pot for a hat, in which
he cooked his supper
toward evening
in the Ohio forests. He wore
a sackcloth shirt and walked
barefoot on feet crooked as roots. And everywhere he went
the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely
as young girls.
No Indian or settler or wild beast
ever harmed him, and he for his part honored
everything, all God's creatures! thought little,
on a rainy night,
of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching
flesh with any creatures there: snakes,
racoon possibly, or some great slab of bear.
Mrs. Price, late of Richland County,
at whose parents' house he sometimes lingered,
recalled: he spoke
only once of women and his gray eyes
brittled into ice. "Some
are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt
the pain of it, remembered it
into her old age.
Well, the trees he planted or gave away
prospered, and he became
the good legend, you do
what you can if you can; whatever
the secret, and the pain,
there's a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something. In spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
sign of him: patches
of cold white fire.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1984.
This collection of 50 pastoral poems is about as good as I’ve read — particularly if you have a childlike wonder for the natural world.
Oliver’s poetry is conventional and clear. She makes heavy use of familiar images to evoke nostalgia. She was one of the most popular poets of the past half century and hailed from the suburbs of Cleveland Ohio.
Here is one of my favorite poems from the American Primitive collection about Johnny Appleseed.
John Chapman
He wore a tin pot for a hat, in which
he cooked his supper
toward evening
in the Ohio forests. He wore
a sackcloth shirt and walked
barefoot on feet crooked as roots. And everywhere he went
the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely
as young girls.
No Indian or settler or wild beast
ever harmed him, and he for his part honored
everything, all God's creatures! thought little,
on a rainy night,
of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching
flesh with any creatures there: snakes,
racoon possibly, or some great slab of bear.
Mrs. Price, late of Richland County,
at whose parents' house he sometimes lingered,
recalled: he spoke
only once of women and his gray eyes
brittled into ice. "Some
are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt
the pain of it, remembered it
into her old age.
Well, the trees he planted or gave away
prospered, and he became
the good legend, you do
what you can if you can; whatever
the secret, and the pain,
there's a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something. In spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
sign of him: patches
of cold white fire.
February 12, 2019
(3.5) Although it won the Pulitzer Prize, this collection isn’t quite as strong (at least for me) as Dream Work. However, it still has plenty of memorable lines, deceptively simple but densely packed with wisdom and, as always, Oliver encourages the reader to appreciate nature and the seasons afresh. There are also a handful of poems about relationships: human tragedies, love and its loss.
Some favorite lines:
“you do / what you can if you can; whatever // the secret, and the pain, // there’s a decision: to die / or to live, to go on / caring about something.” (from “John Chapman”)
“though the questions / that have assailed us all day / remain—not a single / answer has been found— / walking out now / into the silence and the light / under the trees, / and through the fields, / feels like one.” (from “First Snow”)
“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.” (from “In Blackwater Woods”)
Some favorite lines:
“you do / what you can if you can; whatever // the secret, and the pain, // there’s a decision: to die / or to live, to go on / caring about something.” (from “John Chapman”)
“though the questions / that have assailed us all day / remain—not a single / answer has been found— / walking out now / into the silence and the light / under the trees, / and through the fields, / feels like one.” (from “First Snow”)
“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.” (from “In Blackwater Woods”)
June 26, 2019
Mary Oliver is all about love, loss, living, dying; and a passionate physical immersion in nature. Harkening back to Thoreau and Whitman, her language is even more accessible than either, somehow closer to the earth, its smells, its endless decay and rebirth. Many of her images will stop you in your tracks while reading.
As with other of her collections, this one is replete with little glowing masterpieces. One can imagine her passing through a meadow, woodland or marsh and plucking lyrical images to be saved in the leaves of another book, just like picking roses or gathering fireflies or choosing mushrooms to take home for supper.
Her impression of the sudden appearance of egrets, a dashing fox, purple stains of wild blackberries, marshy hummocks and so many more will linger in your consciousness long after closing the book.
How sometimes everything
closes up, a painted fan, landscapes and moments
flowing together until the sense of distance —
say, between Clapp's Pond and me —
vanishes, edges slide together
like the feathers of a wing, everything
touches everything
As with other of her collections, this one is replete with little glowing masterpieces. One can imagine her passing through a meadow, woodland or marsh and plucking lyrical images to be saved in the leaves of another book, just like picking roses or gathering fireflies or choosing mushrooms to take home for supper.
Her impression of the sudden appearance of egrets, a dashing fox, purple stains of wild blackberries, marshy hummocks and so many more will linger in your consciousness long after closing the book.
How sometimes everything
closes up, a painted fan, landscapes and moments
flowing together until the sense of distance —
say, between Clapp's Pond and me —
vanishes, edges slide together
like the feathers of a wing, everything
touches everything
June 27, 2019
I just could not get into this until about 1/2-way through. No doubt it's just me, but there we are. But then in the second half (not that there are halves) I marked:
(from) _Vultures_
Like large dark
lazy
butterflies they sweep over
the glades looking
for death,
to eat it,
to make it vanish,
to make of it the miracle:
resurrection. ....
...
Too long to quote, too interconnected to sample, but worth finding if you can are "The Sea," "Crossing the Swamp" and "Humpbacks."
(from) _Vultures_
Like large dark
lazy
butterflies they sweep over
the glades looking
for death,
to eat it,
to make it vanish,
to make of it the miracle:
resurrection. ....
...
Too long to quote, too interconnected to sample, but worth finding if you can are "The Sea," "Crossing the Swamp" and "Humpbacks."
March 20, 2016
My favorite (from The Plum Trees):
Joy is a taste before
it's anything else, and the body
can lounge for hours devouring
the important moments. Listen,
the only way
to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it
into the body first, like small
wild plums.
Joy is a taste before
it's anything else, and the body
can lounge for hours devouring
the important moments. Listen,
the only way
to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it
into the body first, like small
wild plums.
June 14, 2015
It was a joy to walk her paths for a time.
January 15, 2022
It's so difficult to mark this amazing work as 'read' because..honestly??? Who can ever 'read' (as in 'I already read') Mary Oliver? I've read her work for decades...and I continue to do so, every now and again, and it remains as fresh, vibrant and deeply introspective as ever.
A perfect Saturday? Coming in from sweeping 3" of snow off the porch, putting on some Shirley Horn and Miles.... and reading 'Cold Poem' from the safety of my sofa:
Cold Poem (an excerpt)
Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly,
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else;maybe
that is what it means, the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.
Reading that, I realize that Oliver has managed to make the reader both the blue shark and the tumbling seals. And that is a beautiful thing.
A perfect Saturday? Coming in from sweeping 3" of snow off the porch, putting on some Shirley Horn and Miles.... and reading 'Cold Poem' from the safety of my sofa:
Cold Poem (an excerpt)
Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly,
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else;maybe
that is what it means, the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.
Reading that, I realize that Oliver has managed to make the reader both the blue shark and the tumbling seals. And that is a beautiful thing.
March 15, 2016
I love Mary Oliver's "Dog Songs" and "Blue Horses" but I don't seem to be inspired the same way with her earlier work.
A lot of good poetry here but it didn't grab me. Actually took a very long time to finish. Looking forward to reading her most recent book soon.
A lot of good poetry here but it didn't grab me. Actually took a very long time to finish. Looking forward to reading her most recent book soon.
April 1, 2016
From the banal to the scrupulous.
As I've said before, my vocabulary for writing about poetry is limited. So take that for what it's worth.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. It won the Pulitzer, which is no guarantee of quality, but says better people than me thought it excellent. And, indeed, there are excellent--amazing--poems here. But they are mixed with some that seem simple-minded (perhaps I am too simple minded to understand them) and others that distract from and vitiate the collection's point.
As the title suggests, Oliver is after a primeval American experience, one that not only connects the body to the natural world, but shows them as made up of the same stuff. She aims at stripping away modernity, even as she uses its poetical techniques, to get at those basic things: eating, sex, breathing, seeing, being. The poems are arranged according to the progress of the seasons, underlining that even our sense of time is rooted in the ways of a nature to which we belong but which we cannot control or even escape.
At times, her attempts seem heavy handed. She relies often the words sensuous and silk, both of which proclaim--rather than demonstrate--what she is trying to expose. Some of the poems, in their openness, seem naive. I guess they are meant to be meditations on experience, but the experiences seem well known. Indeed, some of it reads like nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, in its paeans to the healing powers of nature, in its saccharine mood, although the language is more modest, the modernist's demotic English in search of transcendence.
Other poems, though, are densely woven, tying together acute observations, metaphors, and language. There's "The Fish," for example, with its tangle of pagan, Christian, and naturalistic imagery: "I opened his body and separated/the flesh from the bones/and ate him. Now the sea/is in me: I am the fish, the fish/glitters in me; we are/risen, tangled together, certain to fall/back to the sea. Out of pain,/and pain, and more pain/we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished/by the mystery." The ending of "Moles" knocked my socks off:
"so willing to continue/generation after generation/accomplishing nothing/but their brief physical lives/as they live and die,/pushing and shoving/with their stubborn muzzles against/the whole earth,finding it/delicious."
The same elegiac mood brings a whole new dimension to the fable of Johnny Appleseed, in a poem titled "John Chapman":
"Well, the trees he planted or gave away/ prospered, and he became/the good legend, you do/what you can if you can; whatever//the secret, and the pain//there's a decision: to die,/or to live, to go on/caring about something. In Spring, in Ohio,.in the forests that are left you can still find/sign of him: patches/of cold white fire."
There's a bit of humor here, too--which is much needed in nature writing. There's the "Did you?" ending of "Music," for example. Mostly, though, joy and happiness--and there are a lot of references to those--are mediated through metaphor or oblique description (getting messy eating berries and honey is joy for Oliver). The sexiest poem here--"Blossom"--is about a pond that opens in April to the moon, the desire of frogs: "we belong/to the moon and when the ponds/open, when the burning/begins the most/thoughtful among us dreams/of hurrying down/into the black petals,/into the fire/into the night where times lies shattered,/into the body of another."
That tidiness about sex--making it the moon's reflection on a pond--reflects a very 19th century view. (I can imagine the same imagery in a Emily Dickinson poem.) Which brings up the most problematic part of these poems: the use of Native Americans as a proxy for the correct way to interact with nature. There's some straight-up red face here, with one poem talking about a person painted red. Native Americans, of course, are the stereotype of the American Primitive.
The problem here is more than just one about being politically correct. (Although reading this without noticing the use of Native Americans is like reading Thoreau's "Walking" and glossing over "Manifest Destiny" encysted there.) It's that the Native Americans remain stereotypes. Just as nature so often remains stereotyped--fat berries in spring, herons, what have you. It's the problem of the collection as far as I am concerned, what keeps it from being great. The poems too rigorously turns nature into objects of thought, things, and too rarely shows the interpenetration. A large part of that is because the book seems to rely on Romantic tropes, which values wilderness, and that which is separate from humans, and not other kinds of nature--the kind that is always around us.
But of course that should be expected, from the title alone. Oliver is after a particular experience of a particular kind of nature. And in going after that she more often hits her mark than misses it.
As I've said before, my vocabulary for writing about poetry is limited. So take that for what it's worth.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. It won the Pulitzer, which is no guarantee of quality, but says better people than me thought it excellent. And, indeed, there are excellent--amazing--poems here. But they are mixed with some that seem simple-minded (perhaps I am too simple minded to understand them) and others that distract from and vitiate the collection's point.
As the title suggests, Oliver is after a primeval American experience, one that not only connects the body to the natural world, but shows them as made up of the same stuff. She aims at stripping away modernity, even as she uses its poetical techniques, to get at those basic things: eating, sex, breathing, seeing, being. The poems are arranged according to the progress of the seasons, underlining that even our sense of time is rooted in the ways of a nature to which we belong but which we cannot control or even escape.
At times, her attempts seem heavy handed. She relies often the words sensuous and silk, both of which proclaim--rather than demonstrate--what she is trying to expose. Some of the poems, in their openness, seem naive. I guess they are meant to be meditations on experience, but the experiences seem well known. Indeed, some of it reads like nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, in its paeans to the healing powers of nature, in its saccharine mood, although the language is more modest, the modernist's demotic English in search of transcendence.
Other poems, though, are densely woven, tying together acute observations, metaphors, and language. There's "The Fish," for example, with its tangle of pagan, Christian, and naturalistic imagery: "I opened his body and separated/the flesh from the bones/and ate him. Now the sea/is in me: I am the fish, the fish/glitters in me; we are/risen, tangled together, certain to fall/back to the sea. Out of pain,/and pain, and more pain/we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished/by the mystery." The ending of "Moles" knocked my socks off:
"so willing to continue/generation after generation/accomplishing nothing/but their brief physical lives/as they live and die,/pushing and shoving/with their stubborn muzzles against/the whole earth,finding it/delicious."
The same elegiac mood brings a whole new dimension to the fable of Johnny Appleseed, in a poem titled "John Chapman":
"Well, the trees he planted or gave away/ prospered, and he became/the good legend, you do/what you can if you can; whatever//the secret, and the pain//there's a decision: to die,/or to live, to go on/caring about something. In Spring, in Ohio,.in the forests that are left you can still find/sign of him: patches/of cold white fire."
There's a bit of humor here, too--which is much needed in nature writing. There's the "Did you?" ending of "Music," for example. Mostly, though, joy and happiness--and there are a lot of references to those--are mediated through metaphor or oblique description (getting messy eating berries and honey is joy for Oliver). The sexiest poem here--"Blossom"--is about a pond that opens in April to the moon, the desire of frogs: "we belong/to the moon and when the ponds/open, when the burning/begins the most/thoughtful among us dreams/of hurrying down/into the black petals,/into the fire/into the night where times lies shattered,/into the body of another."
That tidiness about sex--making it the moon's reflection on a pond--reflects a very 19th century view. (I can imagine the same imagery in a Emily Dickinson poem.) Which brings up the most problematic part of these poems: the use of Native Americans as a proxy for the correct way to interact with nature. There's some straight-up red face here, with one poem talking about a person painted red. Native Americans, of course, are the stereotype of the American Primitive.
The problem here is more than just one about being politically correct. (Although reading this without noticing the use of Native Americans is like reading Thoreau's "Walking" and glossing over "Manifest Destiny" encysted there.) It's that the Native Americans remain stereotypes. Just as nature so often remains stereotyped--fat berries in spring, herons, what have you. It's the problem of the collection as far as I am concerned, what keeps it from being great. The poems too rigorously turns nature into objects of thought, things, and too rarely shows the interpenetration. A large part of that is because the book seems to rely on Romantic tropes, which values wilderness, and that which is separate from humans, and not other kinds of nature--the kind that is always around us.
But of course that should be expected, from the title alone. Oliver is after a particular experience of a particular kind of nature. And in going after that she more often hits her mark than misses it.
April 22, 2014
I've been chewing on these poems on bad nights for a year now.
Happiness and the black slab of a bear clawing trees for honey until she finds it. That was the first poem I read. I read it again aloud to hear the words against each other until my ex and grumbled and told me to be quiet already.
The kitten with one eye, her body buried quietly under wildflowers. That was last spring with my cat beside me with his two eyes blinking and he was purring and the book in my hand like a dead one-eyed kitten, my hand numb with the weight of it.
Today I read the whole thing cover to cover. I figured I had missed some. It was like using a spatula in a cake bowl after spooning the bulk into the baking pan. Have to make sure to get all of it, can't afford to miss a single dribble.
Happiness and the black slab of a bear clawing trees for honey until she finds it. That was the first poem I read. I read it again aloud to hear the words against each other until my ex and grumbled and told me to be quiet already.
The kitten with one eye, her body buried quietly under wildflowers. That was last spring with my cat beside me with his two eyes blinking and he was purring and the book in my hand like a dead one-eyed kitten, my hand numb with the weight of it.
Today I read the whole thing cover to cover. I figured I had missed some. It was like using a spatula in a cake bowl after spooning the bulk into the baking pan. Have to make sure to get all of it, can't afford to miss a single dribble.
January 16, 2022
she’s perfect. i love her so much. i wish i could give this book not just five stars but all the stars in the night sky.
June 17, 2022
I really enjoyed this poetry collection, especially some toward the end. I really would like to read more of her poetry and writing. Please recommend any of her work you think I should read.
May 8, 2024
really took my time reading this book of poems. Mary Oliver has been a constant inspiration in my life and I am not someone to scribe in any of my books but this one is marked up. absolutely remarkable writing.
November 27, 2025
"Per vivere in questo mondo
devi essere capace
di fare tre cose:
amare ciò che è mortale;
tenerlo stretto
contro le tue ossa sapendo
che ne dipende la tua vita stessa;
e, quando arriva il tempo di lasciarlo andare,
lasciarlo andare."
Questo è un libro fatto di suoni: ogni poesia ti trasporta, con naturalezza, in un luogo diverso. Ne nasce un viaggio silenzioso e intenso.
devi essere capace
di fare tre cose:
amare ciò che è mortale;
tenerlo stretto
contro le tue ossa sapendo
che ne dipende la tua vita stessa;
e, quando arriva il tempo di lasciarlo andare,
lasciarlo andare."
Questo è un libro fatto di suoni: ogni poesia ti trasporta, con naturalezza, in un luogo diverso. Ne nasce un viaggio silenzioso e intenso.
April 12, 2016
Having Google Translate by my side I succeeded in beginning and finishing this little gem in one sitting since, I must confess, Mary Oliver builds a world that is hard to escape once you are inside.
Partly descriptive, partly narrative, her poetry left a metaphysical yet spiritual mark on the reader’s skin using natural elements as a mirror in which her own feelings can be shown always from an optimistic, but not naive, perspective.
A pair of poems:
“August
When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.”
“The snakes
I once saw two snakes,
northern racers,
hurrying through the woods,
their bodies
like two black whips
lifting and dashing forward;
in perfect concert
they held their heads high
and swam forward
on their sleek bellies;
under the trees,
through wines, branches,
over stones,
through fields of flowers
they traveled
like a matched team
like a dance
like a love affair.”
An image:
“In the pinewoods, crows and owl
“(…). Feathers
Falling from your breast like leaves,
And your eyes two bolts
Of lightning go to sleep.
(…)”
Some information to know more about the author: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/m...
An interesting post in Spanish: https://lausinamistica.wordpress.com/...
Partly descriptive, partly narrative, her poetry left a metaphysical yet spiritual mark on the reader’s skin using natural elements as a mirror in which her own feelings can be shown always from an optimistic, but not naive, perspective.
A pair of poems:
“August
When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.”
“The snakes
I once saw two snakes,
northern racers,
hurrying through the woods,
their bodies
like two black whips
lifting and dashing forward;
in perfect concert
they held their heads high
and swam forward
on their sleek bellies;
under the trees,
through wines, branches,
over stones,
through fields of flowers
they traveled
like a matched team
like a dance
like a love affair.”
An image:
“In the pinewoods, crows and owl
“(…). Feathers
Falling from your breast like leaves,
And your eyes two bolts
Of lightning go to sleep.
(…)”
Some information to know more about the author: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/m...
An interesting post in Spanish: https://lausinamistica.wordpress.com/...
November 3, 2007
Have you ever had that surreal feeling when you read something that you've secretly always felt but never really knew it? Mary Oliver is the person who knows these thoughts and secrets that everybody harbors and how we all feel that deep urge to connect with nature.
She opens our souls to the raw, beautiful, seductive and hidden side of nature that is all around us. Her words are beautiful, indescribable, luscious, and scrape nature down to it's core. It is a book that can relate to everything. Read it when you're tired, when you are up late at night, need to escape reality, or are feeling philosophical and inspired. Her poetry is life changing and you will forever be thinking about it from the moment you begin. Buy a copy and cherish it forever.
She opens our souls to the raw, beautiful, seductive and hidden side of nature that is all around us. Her words are beautiful, indescribable, luscious, and scrape nature down to it's core. It is a book that can relate to everything. Read it when you're tired, when you are up late at night, need to escape reality, or are feeling philosophical and inspired. Her poetry is life changing and you will forever be thinking about it from the moment you begin. Buy a copy and cherish it forever.
June 19, 2020
I returned to this 1984 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems after reading a literary journal stuffed with nature poems that just seemed unnecessary. As I read through the journal I kept thinking that Oliver had covered this terrain so much more powerfully. And after rereading her collection again I remain wowed and convinced that American Primitive is and will be a much deserved classic that lyrically evokes the natural world without forgetting our place in it. Search this one out if you don't know it.
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