New and Selected Poems, Volume One

by Mary Oliver

When New and Selected Poems, Volume One was originally published in 1992, Mary Oliver was awarded the National Book Award. In the fourteen years since its initial appearance it has become one of the best-selling volumes of poetry in the country. This collection features thirty poems published only in this volume as well as selections from the poet's first eight books.

Mary Oliver's perceptive, brilliantly crafted poems about the natural landscape and the fundamental questions of life and death have won high praise from critics and readers alike. "Do you love this world?" she interrupts a poem about peonies to ask the reader. "Do you cherish your humble and silky life?" She makes us see the extraordinary in our everyday lives, how something as common as light can be "an invitation/to happiness,/and that happiness,/when it's done right,/is a kind of holiness,/palpable and redemptive." She illuminates how a near miss with an alligator can be the catalyst for seeing the world "as if for the second time/the way it really is." Oliver's passionate demonstrations of delight are powerful reminders of the bond between every individual, all living things, and the natural world.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Nonfiction, Classics, Spirituality, LGBT, Literature

284 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Mary 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.

Reviews

[Lucy Dacus · Rating 5 out of 5]

40 favorites:
Rain
When Death Comes
Her Grave
The Waterfall
Peonies
The Sun
White Flowers
October
-
The Buddha’s Last Instruction
Singapore
Little Owl Who Lives In The Orchard
The Kookaburras
The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water
The Ponds
The Summer Day
Roses, Late Summer
-
Dogfish
Rage
Wild Geese
Robert Schumann
The Journey
A Visitor
-
Ghosts
The Fish
Tecumseh
In Blackwater Woods
-
Sleeping in the Forest
Mussels
Bone Poem
Aunt Leaf
-
Aunt Elsie’s Night Music
Farm Country
Roses
Ice
-
Spring in the Classroom
Anne
Magellan
Going to Walden
-
A Dream of Trees
The Swimming Lesson

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

RIP, Mary Oliver, 1/17/19

“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 is 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.”

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll admit it. I'm often intimidated by poetry. Many times I can't understand or find meaning in poems I've read.

I was familiar with some of Mary Oliver's most well-known poems, such as "The Summer Day", "Wild Geese", and "Why I Wake Early", but wouldn't have read this entire book if it wasn't for a challenge for National Poetry month.

I'm very glad that I took the time to go through this book poem by poem. While there were a few that left me scratching my head, on the whole Oliver's poems are approachable and quite moving. Using the natural world as inspiration, Oliver creates metaphors and observations about the human condition that beautifully ring true.

I dog-eared at least 20 poems in this collection, so I can easily find them later, and discovered new favorites such as "Whelks" "The Sun", "University Hospital, Boston" and "The Black Walnut Tree".

4 stars

[Debbie "DJ" · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic! Oliver's poems always touch my heart, and this collection shares her best...especially "Wild Geese," and "The Journey."

[Marissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE Mary Oliver and would recommend her poetry to anyone. One of the reasons I so love her work is that she is totally accessible. She doesn't write those things that are so obtuse that you are afraid to say, "What the hell is that about?" because everyone else is also afraid to say that and so they all act like it's just brilliant and so no one ever just says, "That makes no *&$%!*&! sense at all. It's horrible." And such is the world of art and poetry today.

Anyway, enough of my rant. If you don't care for poetry but would like to, read Mary Oliver. My two favorite poems are "Summer Day" & "Wild Geese." Google them. Read them. Go ahead. I dare you.

On the other hand, if you are a fan of urinal upside down on the wall installation art, forget it. You'll hate this. It makes too much sense. :)

[Tom Shadyac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary Oliver is a national treasure. She is as close to a living, breathing, Ralph Waldo Emerson as we have today. And while her poetry explores the beauty of nature, Mary never forgets that we are nature, as well. Lessons learned from the grace of a swan, or the patience discerned in the face of a stone, bring us closer to the essential and therefore, bring us closer to ourselves. You can’t go wrong with any of her books. My introduction was a poem entitled, The Journey, and I quickly found myself deliriously, deliciously addicted. Her First and Second Anthologies are wonderful and give the reader an overview of her immense talent and gift. But I encourage you to read it all, every glorious poem or prose. Mary has glimpsed the divine, and with language that is direct and clear, encourages all of us to simply pay attention, and to wake up to the beauty bursting around us.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not often,
but now and again there's a moment
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light.

Mary Oliver takes my breath away.

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obviously loved this reread. What a life-sustaining book. I really ought to get myself volume two!

"Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body"

From "Humpbacks"

[Jeannie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Bitterness

I believe you did not have a happy life.
I believe you were cheated.
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 believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.
I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as
your bitterness.
I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and
unassuaged.
Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful
flowers of the hillsides.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty)]

Yesterday I gorged on my first feast of Mary Oliver's work, racing through three of her short books all in a day. I've started this one with determination to go a bit more slowly, but as I page through what is here, all I can think is oh, oh, oh, oh, oh! More, more, more, more, more!

June 20
I've finally finished. I took my time with this one, as it covers poetry from many stages of her life, going back to the 1960s. It's hard to assign a rating, but I can recommend it without reservation.

[Anna Petruk · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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."

This book... I have no words. Every poem in this volume was brilliant. I had to stop myself from bookmarking every piece and ended up bookmarking every other piece. I took my time reading this book just to be able to soak up its beauty better.

For many people, poetry is associated with romantic love and longing. I don't think any of these were about romance. Mary Oliver's works are focused on nature, animals, the depth of the human experience, the non-romantic connection, and loyalty between people. These poems teem with life and it's heartbreakingly beautiful.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"

[Tylor Lovins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wittgenstein once said "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent." As a logico-philosophical imperative, this is also an ethical imperative. Oliver's anthology is beautiful and insightful as she is successful in expressing the inexpressible precisely because she does not try to do it. She simply describes life, and in her descriptions we begin to understand life in its competing contrasts and depths. These, it turns out, are the things we fail to learn from, and to see beauty in its nakedness.

I'd recommend this to any reader of poetry.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh I love Mary Oliver. She is fierce about nature and just when you think you cannot possibly read another poem about another meadow flower she throws one at ya like
"listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
Brilliant I say.
And I love her attitude about life, you can either mope around in your life or you can go forth with the ferocity of all that is splendid and real!

[Samata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Its been a long time since I read her last...yesterday my little sister asked me what "ineffable" means, and as I was explaining its meaning to her somewhere inside someplace a tiny voice kept insisting,just say "its rather like a Mary Oliver poem"...I do not feel like addressing her with a commonplace Miss Oliver...not when I know her like that and she me..Mary strips me of all my desperate strength, all the futile hard earned evolution and adornments I managed to soil myself with on the way, and as I now sit back, softly murmuring the wise words of her love letters to life, I feel that natural nakedness again, all the excruciating otherness washed and anointed with tender images of the ridiculously simple,my hands are trembling as I type this,I cannot even begin to explain the kind of ancient guttural reflexes she elicits from me. Eliot said the natural language of drama is poetry, I say the natural language of all manner of sentience is music, or anything that evokes it thereby reversing the normal psycho-epistemological process and reaching that raw core in us directly and irrevocably. She does that and stays there. This is my first review here, and I wanted it to be for someone very very special,I read her back in those days when the idealism was just beginning to seep out,so here's to the memory of the 16 year old me and the trembling mass of inconsolable longing I have been thereafter,in memory of Mary the sensational lover,the ever faithful bride married to amazement, who always had room in her heart for the unimaginable,the soul born out of pure attentiveness,I don't want to know what path my life would have tread if you hadn't occurred to me..

[Gearóid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just came across Mary Oliver by chance and so glad i did.
Her poetry really bringing you immediately into beauty of nature
and takes you away from the rush of modern life.
Kind of like mindfulness makes you pause and realise what really matters.

Finished this book but of course will continually re-read these great poems.

[Ava Cairns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Y'ALL. I got to page 191, not 251, so I didn't entirely finish the book.
With this book (and Dream of A Common Language) as the exception, I will ALWAYS finish the book I started. My mind nags me if I don't.
It is both a blessing and a curse to have the need to finish every book you once picked up.
And not finishing this WONDERFUL book was a little painful.
Mary Oliver reminded me why I love poetry so much.
It was a profound uplifter at a time where the world is a profound sadness.
Thank you, Mary Oliver, I love you!!!
Favorite/deepest poem: Poem of the Anniversary (talks about the holocaust)
a fragment of the A Meeting poem:
"I meet them.
I can only stare.
She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.
Her child leaps among the flowers,
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."

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good poetry collection.

Tended towards the nature poetry a bit much for my taste, but these are the collected poems so these are kind of like the greatest hits.

[J & J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this collection. Definitely the kind of poetry that resonates with me. I look forward to reading more of Mary Oliver's work.

[Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oliver had an unquenchable fire burning for signs and wonders. In a world filled with corporatist sound and fury, Oliver beckoned us to pay attention to the natural world: to its unveiling of itself to us. Attention and care are the price of admission.

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

new and selected poems, volume one is a rather remarkable collection of poetry by mary oliver. here the art form i am so fond of masterfully sat in front of me with a beautiful use of language and techniques to convey the poet’s wonders, feelings, and messages. it was as if each poem was a warm hug, enveloping you in the beauty of life no matter the suffering or the complications. no matter the uncertainty of life or what comes after.

roses, late summer

“what happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? what happens

to the singing birds
when they can’t sing
any longer? what happens
to their quick wings?

do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children

to live in the valley.
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of light
that stands up every morning

in the dark sky.
and over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.

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.”

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary Oliver is the greatest of them all. I bookmarked about 25 poems in this collection that I plan to read frequently (and already have.) She writes mainly about nature, starting with the smallest details described in the most artistic way, panning out its (and our) purpose in this world. I will say, I enjoyed the first half of this collection (poems from the '90s/'80s) significantly more than the second half (poems from the '60s/'70s).

If you've ever wanted to get into poetry but roll your eyes at rhyme or forced abstract descriptions, I love Oliver's effortless approachability.

[Hanka Jirovská · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find reading poetry quite intimidating because I often feel like I am missing the point or not understanding it well enough. nonetheless, most of these poems were quite approachable and reading them brought me a feeling of quiet wonder. I'll be definitely coming back to some of my favourites.

(tbh, rating such a large collection is hard - some poems were truly brilliant but some I could not figure out, so take the four stars with a grain of salt)

[Book2Dragon · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poet. Her work always blends simplicity and depth. She lived in the moment taking note of Nature and reveling in it. This is a volume of her earlier poems, and a feast for any lover of poetry.
Mary is accessible, and if you don't really like poetry, I challenge you that Mary Oliver will change your mind.

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

queen of my heart and soul

[Jenny Cooke (Bookish Shenanigans) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just breathtakingly beautiful.

[Andy Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What does the world mean to you, if you can’t trust it to go on shining when you’re not there?”

This is the first poetry I’ve ever really loved I think. Mary has such a gift for looking outside and just like noticing shit? Especially appreciate how she wastes no words with trying to be deep or pretentious. 👑

[Grace Thrasher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this all summer and I really enjoyed it!! I liked the selections of new poems best and some of my favorites were peonies, the summer day, the lamps, and the swimming lesson. Her ruminations on nature and life were poignant and beautiful and they made me reflect! Very good :)

[Lameesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

obsessed with Oliver's ability to wax out the most endearing poetry even when she's writing about molluscs

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ahhhh tiesin jo alkupään runoja lukiessa että annan tälle viisi tähteä<3 Rakastan Mary Oliveria<3 Kirjoitan mielelläni ekan arvioni hänelle<3

Oliverin runot on vaan... yksinkertaisia... viisaita... ja kauniita...... Jokaisessa on joku syvällinen mutta tavallinen havainto. Ne on helppolukuisia runoja luonnosta ja elämästä ja kuolemasta. Niin helppolukuisia että musta tuntuu melkein nololta tykätä niistä näin paljon. Joku osa musta haluais fanittaa jotain tosi vaikeeta ja kokeellista eikä tällasia kauniita ajatuksia joiden lukeminen tuntuu self-helpiltä.

Mut sit taas Oliverin runot ei oo pelkästään että feel the rain on your skin no one else can feel it for you. Siellä on hitunen raivoa ja melankoliaa ja välillä viittauksia Oliverin oman elämän vaikeisiin juttuihin. Takakansitekstissä kuvaillaan musta hyvin: "There is no complaint in Ms. Oliver's poetry, no whining, but neither is there the sense that life is in any way easy."

Mä kuulin Oliverista ekaa kertaa kun hän kuoli alkuvuodesta 2019. Olin just saapunut Hongkongiin vaihtoon ja mulla oli tylsää ja olin yksinäinen. Oliverin runot ja elämäntarina jotenkin lohdutti mua tosi paljon....? Katoin tän aika monta kertaa xDDD

Hyvä kirja. Ja eka runokirja jonka oon oikeesti lukenut alusta loppuun!

[Hanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is only one question: how to love this world," Mary Oliver writes in "Spring," one of the finest poems in this collection. The selections in this book try to find answers to that question, primarily in the natural world. These are poems about nature and wonder, love and death, egrets and humpback whales. They aren't difficult poems, but straightforward in their precise, well-crafted imagery. There is a beauty in their apparent simplicity, in the observations of a poet clearly in love with the natural world around her. In her own words:

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.

From "When Death Comes"