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God of Dirt: Mary Oliver and the Other Book of God
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive , Mary Oliver has published twelve books of poetry and five books of essays. Her poems are quoted in everything from Web sites to hymn books. Earthlight , a “Magazine of Spiritual Ecology,” has declared her an “earth saint.”
In this engaging study, Mann shows Oliver to have keen eyes and ears for reading the book of nature. Readers will discover that the correspondence between Oliver's poetry and traditional religious language provides a fresh perspective from which to enjoy her work. Here there is a god, but one who at first seems unrecognizable, at least to Judeo-Christian religious tradition. We know of the “God of heaven,” and even the “God of heaven and earth,” but a god of dirt?
Oliver's reading of the Other Book of God invites us into nature's “temple” where we may come into the presence of the holy and from which we may leave rejuvenated and blessed. God of Dirt is an important study of a contemporary poet whose work is as likely to be read by a preacher in a pulpit as by an activist at an environmental rally, and will help us experience a new vision of the beauty of our world.
In this engaging study, Mann shows Oliver to have keen eyes and ears for reading the book of nature. Readers will discover that the correspondence between Oliver's poetry and traditional religious language provides a fresh perspective from which to enjoy her work. Here there is a god, but one who at first seems unrecognizable, at least to Judeo-Christian religious tradition. We know of the “God of heaven,” and even the “God of heaven and earth,” but a god of dirt?
Oliver's reading of the Other Book of God invites us into nature's “temple” where we may come into the presence of the holy and from which we may leave rejuvenated and blessed. God of Dirt is an important study of a contemporary poet whose work is as likely to be read by a preacher in a pulpit as by an activist at an environmental rally, and will help us experience a new vision of the beauty of our world.
77 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
10 people are currently reading
95 people want to read
About the author
Thomas W. Mann
13 books1 followerThomas W. Mann has taught at Princeton Theological Seminary, Converse College, Salem College, and Wake Forest University. For twenty-three years he was also the minister of Parkway United Church of Christ in Winston Salem, North Carolina. He is the author of The Book of the Former Prophets (Cascade Books, 2011), a sequel to this book; Deuteronomy (1995); and God of Dirt: Mary Oliver and the Other Book of God (2004).
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 14, 2016
I have always been drawn to Mary Oliver’s poetry. Like many other people I think it’s profoundly spiritual despite the fact that she rarely uses the language and vocabulary of religion. For her, spirituality has nothing to do with theology but rather it’s a matter of paying close attention to what the natural world has to reveal about what other people call God. Thomas Mann’s slim little volume is an excellent companion for those who would like to take a closer look at what the best and most beautiful of Oliver’s poems have to say about the “other Book of God.”
The idea that nature can be read like a book goes back thousands of years and is reflected in numerous scriptural passages (“The Heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. - Ps. 19:1) It shows up frequently in the writings of early Christian writers like St. Augustine (“Look above you, look below you….God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead He set before your eyes the things that He had made”) And St. Anthony of the desert (“My book is the nature of created things, and as often as I have a mind to read the words of God, they are at my hand,") And the 12th century philosopher and mystical writer, Hugh of St. Victor (For this whole sensible world is like a kind of book written by the fingers of God.”) Mary Oliver’s poetry is filled with beautiful examples of that lavishly illustrated book: “And the thrush sings/like a finger of God” she says in one of her poems, using an image that comes to us from the Latin words Digitis Dei (fingers of God.)
Thomas Mann gives us a chance to take a closer look at the various themes and images that show up again and again in Oliver’s poetry. Many of us have found that her poems are an invitation to approach the world of nature with reverence, because of what Oliver has called “the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God.” Anyone who loves her poetry will find Thomas Mann’s little book well worth reading.
The idea that nature can be read like a book goes back thousands of years and is reflected in numerous scriptural passages (“The Heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. - Ps. 19:1) It shows up frequently in the writings of early Christian writers like St. Augustine (“Look above you, look below you….God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead He set before your eyes the things that He had made”) And St. Anthony of the desert (“My book is the nature of created things, and as often as I have a mind to read the words of God, they are at my hand,") And the 12th century philosopher and mystical writer, Hugh of St. Victor (For this whole sensible world is like a kind of book written by the fingers of God.”) Mary Oliver’s poetry is filled with beautiful examples of that lavishly illustrated book: “And the thrush sings/like a finger of God” she says in one of her poems, using an image that comes to us from the Latin words Digitis Dei (fingers of God.)
Thomas Mann gives us a chance to take a closer look at the various themes and images that show up again and again in Oliver’s poetry. Many of us have found that her poems are an invitation to approach the world of nature with reverence, because of what Oliver has called “the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God.” Anyone who loves her poetry will find Thomas Mann’s little book well worth reading.
July 2, 2023
The perfect book for anyone who loves Mary Oliver's poems & their wild spirituality & is frustrated by Christianity's wilful refusal to include 'The Other Book of God'; a refusal which is damaging to ourselves and to the planet.
This book goes a very long way to reconnecting what has been disconnected. I felt that it lost its way a little towards the end but there are so many wonderful, inspiring quotes here (especially about mud!), so many threads to follow, and so much deep-heartedness that that hardly matters. And I loved his insistence that Oliver is not a 'sentimental poet'. Indeed not!
Much recommended.
This book goes a very long way to reconnecting what has been disconnected. I felt that it lost its way a little towards the end but there are so many wonderful, inspiring quotes here (especially about mud!), so many threads to follow, and so much deep-heartedness that that hardly matters. And I loved his insistence that Oliver is not a 'sentimental poet'. Indeed not!
Much recommended.
Read
May 21, 2023Literally why have I not read this until now. Loved it! Already want to reread! MO forever and ever and ever amen.
While I was reading the part about death, I witnessed a hawk strangle a squirrel in its talons, carry it to a tree branch, and devour it. Perfect timing.
“… when we compare the two books of God we can see that both function to ask the reader, Who are you and how do you intend to live? In reading both we encounter holiness, we receive a blessing, we are healed, we are reborn. Just as Wink can talk about the Bible in human transformation, so Oliver could talk about ‘Nature in Human Transformation.’ She brings us to the temple in the wildwood and challenges us ‘to believe in everything,’ to ‘begin again,’ to ‘look!’”
“Before any attempt to address the problems of environmental degradation, however, we must undergo a change of consciousness. We must come to a new sense of the sacredness of the earth under our feet and the sky over our heads. We must come to the humble awareness that we humans are only one part of ‘the family of things.’ We must experience a new vision of the beauty of our world. That is why we so desperately need the artists among us. ‘I am a performing artist,’ Oliver says, ‘I perform admiration. / Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.’ That is exactly what we intend to do.”
“As she points out in a brief essay, portraying animals as cute prevents our understanding of nature as ‘a realm both sacred and intricate, as well as powerful, of which we are no more than a single part.’ Her refusal to belittle any part of nature—animal, vegetable, or mineral—sounds like a renunciation of the ‘rule and conquer’ anthropology implied in Genesis 1.28: ‘I would not be the overlord of a single blade of grass, that I might be its sister.’ The more that we humanize nature, then, the more we express our alienation from it. Naming animals (Bambi), making them look and talk like us, robs them of their sacredness, that is, their holiness. To be holy means to be ‘set apart.’ Ironically, we cannot be a part of nature unless we can acknowledge its otherness. As Abram says of indigenous cultures, our ‘otherness’ as humans is made ‘eerily potent’ precisely by our ‘familial’ connection. For Oliver, the goal is not to make animals human, but, by imaginative attention, to intuit what it might be like to be an animal. It is the very wildness of animals that makes them spiritually significant. Domestication—whether physical or metaphorical—robs them of their otherness and reduces them to playthings.”
“‘Resurrection,’ therefore, seems to refer to a return to that larger ‘family’ to which all beings belong. That return is part of the process that produces or nurtures new life in some form—the ecological benefits of brutality. Owls—some of the most frequent predators in Oliver’s poems—‘are what keeps everything / enough, but not too many’ (‘Bowing to the Empress,’ DW 55). In fact, one of the poems that describes the owl’s bloody feeding is called ‘Praise’ (HL 46).”
While I was reading the part about death, I witnessed a hawk strangle a squirrel in its talons, carry it to a tree branch, and devour it. Perfect timing.
“… when we compare the two books of God we can see that both function to ask the reader, Who are you and how do you intend to live? In reading both we encounter holiness, we receive a blessing, we are healed, we are reborn. Just as Wink can talk about the Bible in human transformation, so Oliver could talk about ‘Nature in Human Transformation.’ She brings us to the temple in the wildwood and challenges us ‘to believe in everything,’ to ‘begin again,’ to ‘look!’”
“Before any attempt to address the problems of environmental degradation, however, we must undergo a change of consciousness. We must come to a new sense of the sacredness of the earth under our feet and the sky over our heads. We must come to the humble awareness that we humans are only one part of ‘the family of things.’ We must experience a new vision of the beauty of our world. That is why we so desperately need the artists among us. ‘I am a performing artist,’ Oliver says, ‘I perform admiration. / Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.’ That is exactly what we intend to do.”
“As she points out in a brief essay, portraying animals as cute prevents our understanding of nature as ‘a realm both sacred and intricate, as well as powerful, of which we are no more than a single part.’ Her refusal to belittle any part of nature—animal, vegetable, or mineral—sounds like a renunciation of the ‘rule and conquer’ anthropology implied in Genesis 1.28: ‘I would not be the overlord of a single blade of grass, that I might be its sister.’ The more that we humanize nature, then, the more we express our alienation from it. Naming animals (Bambi), making them look and talk like us, robs them of their sacredness, that is, their holiness. To be holy means to be ‘set apart.’ Ironically, we cannot be a part of nature unless we can acknowledge its otherness. As Abram says of indigenous cultures, our ‘otherness’ as humans is made ‘eerily potent’ precisely by our ‘familial’ connection. For Oliver, the goal is not to make animals human, but, by imaginative attention, to intuit what it might be like to be an animal. It is the very wildness of animals that makes them spiritually significant. Domestication—whether physical or metaphorical—robs them of their otherness and reduces them to playthings.”
“‘Resurrection,’ therefore, seems to refer to a return to that larger ‘family’ to which all beings belong. That return is part of the process that produces or nurtures new life in some form—the ecological benefits of brutality. Owls—some of the most frequent predators in Oliver’s poems—‘are what keeps everything / enough, but not too many’ (‘Bowing to the Empress,’ DW 55). In fact, one of the poems that describes the owl’s bloody feeding is called ‘Praise’ (HL 46).”
October 27, 2023
A clear, straightforward, and attractive account of Mary Oliver's unsentimental romanticism, in dialogue with the Hebrew Bible and with modern Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber and Abraham Heschel. In her poem 'The Turtle', Mary Oliver writes:
Nothing's important
except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,
of which this is a part,
not to be denied.
This book gives a rich account of both sides - the world's mysterious greatness as well as its mysterious cruelty. Recommended for anyone who enjoys Mary Oliver's poetry.
Nothing's important
except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,
of which this is a part,
not to be denied.
This book gives a rich account of both sides - the world's mysterious greatness as well as its mysterious cruelty. Recommended for anyone who enjoys Mary Oliver's poetry.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews