Conner’s Reviews > Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver > Status Update

Strangely, my dominant emotion while reading this collection has been jealousy; Oliver’s joyful existence in nature is so much the antithesis of my experience being cooped up in a tiny city apartment for an entire year with nary a tree or bird in sight. The pleasure she takes in meadows, beaches and forests is almost unseemly in this context, like an unimaginable luxury. But anyway, that’s a personal problem.