Peddling Poetry

I’m going to plagiarize myself again (shhhhhhhhh!). I wrote this some time ago (for that same, defunct literary blog) to sing the praises of the poet Mary Oliver. Those of you who have followed my ramblings over time have encountered a few of her poems sprinkled here and there. I thought it worthwhile to focus on her work a bit more. She is a marvelous poet. I daresay, even those not usually fond of poetry may find her words enchanting.

Catholic nuns impressed upon me, at a very early age, that it was a desecration (bordering on mortal sin) to dog-ear the pages of a book. In my innocent youth I strove to respect every book I touched. Miscreant that I am, however, I eventually succumbed to dog-earing the pages of poetry books. I wanted to find my favorite poems as quickly as possible. Hence…despite chronic guilt…I filled my shelves with tomes of poems, ragged but glorious in their defilement.

And so it was when I picked up Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems – Volume One. Each page ended bent and frayed. Dog-eared page after dog-eared page, I found myself transported to a profoundly beautiful world of owls, hummingbirds, swamps, forests, daisies, sunflowers, ravens, deer and herons. Mary Oliver renders the ordinary extraordinary and finds deeper truths in the living world surrounding us. I found her poems so captivating that I realized, about halfway through her book, that I had dog-eared every page. There was simply no need to mark all the pages. Each poem was a joy, a gift, a revelation. Yes, she is THAT good. She truly deserves her Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award. This book is, without a doubt, my favorite poetry collection of all time (sorry Pablo and May…).

For those of you who have yet to experience the wisdom and innate goodness of Mary Oliver, here are a few morsels:

“…and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.

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…”

“…for it’s true, isn’t it,
in our world,
that the petals pooled with nectar, and the polished thorns
are a single thing –
that even the purest light, lacking the robe of darkness,
would be without expression –
that love itself, without its pain, would be
no more than a shruggable comfort…”

“…where the hummingbird comes
like a small green angel, to soak
his dark tongue in happiness –“

“When I woke
the morning light was just slipping
in front of the stars,
and I was covered
with blossoms…”

“Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.”

“In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.”

“…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.”

“Like Magellan, let us find our islands
To die in, far from home, from anywhere
Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places,
Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.”

“Because we lived our several lives
Caught up within the spells of love,
Because we always had to run
Through the enormous yards of day
To do all that we hoped to do,
We did not hear, beneath our lives,
The old walls falling out of true,
Foundations shifting in the dark.”

“…and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing that you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.”

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