Devotions: A Read with Jenna Pick
The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
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4.1 • 57 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A READ WITH JENNA PICK • From the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Mary Oliver, a definitive and enduring collection of her best work
“No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love. . . . Perhaps more important, the luminous writing provides respite from our crazy world and demonstrates how mindfulness can define and transform a life, moment by moment, poem by poem.”—The Washington Post
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver, from “The Summer Day”
Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Arranged by Oliver herself shortly before her death in 2019, Devotions features Oliver’s work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of twenty-eight, through her last, Felicity, published in 2015.
This timeless volume showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This poetry compilation from acclaimed American poet Mary Oliver is an enchanting love letter to nature’s simple pleasures. Devotions draws together over 200 of Oliver’s most notable poems from the 1960s to the 2010s—and while Oliver’s wondrous poems about her experiences in nature feature prominently, she also broaches topics from God to the purpose of human existence and even the colonization of native land. With Oliver’s languid, flowing poetic style and her ability to convert the smallest details from the natural world into a lyrical object of beauty, the poems in Devotions will make you want to fill the book with sticky notes so you can return to it for inspiration or solace. You could even say it’s a how-to guide for life: Oliver’s pensive outlook on human mortality and her ability to appreciate the minutiae of everyday life are things we could learn from. Devotions truly is an essential text for nature lovers, poetry aficionados both casual and serious, and anyone who has ever mused about the meaning of life.
Customer Reviews
Mary Oliver’s Devotions
Oliver has a way of drawing the reader into her intimate relationship with the Flora an Fauna of the Nature she lives with in Provincetown and Florida. In these poems she shares the secret lives of grasshoppers, poppies, moles, mussels, owls, foxes and deer.
While doing it she asks herself the ultimate questions of life. She tempts her readers to question their own lives, their relation to urban culture and the Nature they should love as much as she does. Her language is deceptively simple and straightforward. But it masks a depth of passion that drives her verse. Her Nature is fascinating. You’ll come to love it as much as she does.
An excellent collection!
I was really blown away by the voice of the author. This book is a treasure trove of brain diamonds.