Will I love New and Selected Poems?

I’m so not a country gal! No to ‘roughing it’. No to the scenic hikes and the bugs that got under my socks and inside my shirt! And the bear I thought I saw crossing the road ahead of me and my friend. So to love Mary Oliver’s poetry of nature came as a great surprise.

Her observational poems bring me to another space. One where there is a curiosity about things I might take for granted: bogs, streams, mushrooms, owls. Her poems bring calm and are soothing when you’re having a painful knee. Mary Oliver almost makes me want… show more.

I used to think things like beauty, joy, and affection were indulgences that I just didn’t have time for if I was going to solve the climate crisis.

I used to do my climate work bare-knuckled and through gritted teeth. And I burned out. Fast.

Then I had a friend suggest to me that I read Mary Oliver.

I’ve since come to understand that meditation and contemplation on the beauty of creation, on the joy and delight of being in communion with it, and on the affection that God has for all his handiwork are necessary ingredients for sustained, effective… show more.

Like nature itself, poetry allows quiet reflection and a deep peace into our lives. Like Mary Oliver, I too, find an almost divine rapture in the sheer glory of Nature’s elemental wildness. In this collection, Oliver's mystical connection to nature combined with her simple language and clear imagery create poems that are profoundly beautiful. During these past years of the global pandemic lockdown, I was unable to restore my soul by visiting the South African wilderness that is so close to the city I live in. Instead, through contemplation of Oliver’s poetry and writing my own, I was able to… show more.