the poetry of Mary Oliver

‘Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman. “Oliver’s poetry”, wrote Poetry magazine contributor Richard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling.”’ - Poetry Foundation, US

Two Poems by Mary Oliver

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

 Hear Mary Oliver reading ‘Wild Geese’, Brainpicker on Soundcloud.

From Dog Songs (2013)

Luke

I had a dog
  who loved flowers.
    Briskly she went
        through the fields, 

yet paused
  for the honeysuckle
    or the rose,
        her dark head 

and her wet nose
  touching
    the face
         of every one 

with its petals
  of silk,
    with its fragrance
         rising 

into the air
  where the bees,
    their bodies
        heavy with pollen, 

hovered—
  and easily
     she adored
        every blossom, 

not in the serious,
  careful way
    that we choose
        this blossom or that blossom— 

the way we praise or don’t praise—
  the way we love
     or don’t love—
        but the way 

we long to be—
  that happy
    in the heaven of earth—
        that wild, that loving.