Mary Oliver is a joy to read, read, and read again. Let the words bring forth images, feelings, thoughts, and understanding of the world around us.

Dive in. Float. Do a brisk set of strokes. Take a deep breath. Sink to the bottom. Still in the water and mud of the pond. Dry oneself under the pine. Watch the trees, morning glories, roses, heron, deer, toad, snake, owl, fish, dog, stars, sun, and moon. Listen. Smell. Forget your worries and just be. Pick yourself up and walk home loving madly those alive and dead.

Thank you Mary Oliver. ( )

Mary Oliver has the ability to describe, in perhaps as little as one or two lines, some quality of the natural world that to me is only a fleeting feeling or mood when I am out in the countryside or in the forest. I am sometimes astonished at how she is able to put into words of either poetry or prose, what, to my mind, are ineffable qualities.

In the poem, Hummingbirds, for example, she describes the act of climbing a tree and realizing she has disturbed a hummingbird nest...

The female, and the two chicks,
each no bigger than my thumb,
scattered,
shimmering

in their pale-green dresses;
then they rose, tiny fireworks,
into the leaves
and hovered;....

Later in the poem, she describes the three birds...

like three tosses of silvery water,
they were gone.

I read her poems and marvel at her use of language to describe simple things.

In many of her poems, she also interjects moments of deep contemplation or introspection....

Alone,
in the crown of the tree,

I went to China,
I went to Prague;
I died, and was born in the spring;
I found you, and loved you, again...

So there she sits, daydreaming in the tree, having disturbed the hummingbird nest and ends the poem having also disturbed her own inner thoughts...

Likely I visited all
the shimmering, heart-stabbing
questions without answers
before I climbed down.

If only I could put into words my inner musings the way Mary Oliver does. Her poetry's biggest appeal to me is this introversion and obvious love and appreciation of the natural world. When I have "shimmering, heart-stabbing questions without answers" my first go-to place is my backyard underneath the oak tree, sitting in silence. ( )

A beautifully designed chapbook of poems by the supreme nature poet, Pulitzer-winning Mary Oliver.

Short excerpt:

In fall, in the garden and the fields beyond, in the delicate yellow space between anything, spiders, plump as acorns, spin their webs; they are the wildest woven things; they are the most shimmering death-traps.

-- From "Spiders", p.46 ( )