Mary Oliver is the most gifted poet I've read. Her poem 'Wild Geese' has been a long time favorite, and this collection was just as amazing. This author proceeds to impress time after time.

I have heard a lot about Mary Oliver and have actually read her collection Dog Songs before this one. I believe that's what it was called. It wasn't anything special but I heard a lot about her so I wanted to give her other stuff a try. I'm glad I did, I really enjoyed this one.

"Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was a simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated."

Terry Tempest Williams takes her own words to heart in When Women Were Birds (Picador, $17), a kind of personal-memoir-turned-essay-collection in which she explores the deeply personal (the loss of her mother, reflections on her Mormon upbringing, anecdotes from her marriage) and the universal (finding one's voice, especially as a woman). Though the collection covers heavy topics and difficult subjects, it is ultimately a celebration of the world with its many flaws and quiet moments of beauty. Mary Oliver, like Williams, is known for her reflections on nature and our place within it. Though Oliver is most frequently recognized for her poetry, the essays in Upstream (Penguin Press, $26) offer celebratory meditations on work, art, nature and place--and the intersections of each.

The tradition of reflective, personal writing does not stop with Williams or Oliver. In her memoir, H Is for Hawk (Grove, $16), Helen Macdonald offers a similarly lyrical reflection on life (and death) and grief and healing. Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald adopts a goshawk and spends months training it--and grieving. Jessa Crispin's The Dead Ladies Project (University of Chicago Press, $16) is an autobiographical exploration of the lives of women writers who scrapped their conventional lives for something new and different. Margaux Bergen's Navigating Life (Penguin Press, $26) is ostensibly a collection of advice from mother to daughter, but is as introspective as it is instructive.

Though each of these women writes about a different time, a different place, and a different topic, they are all, as Williams might say, finding their song--remembering what might be forgotten, and celebrating what is remembered in the process.

Classic Mary Oliver with a focus on nature and animals. A great body of work for all readers of Oliver.

Another beautiful collection from Oliver. I found myself reading this in one sitting and then had to go back and reread it again a few more times because it was so hard to get out of my head.

Mary Oliver has been one of my favorite poets since I read her poem, “The Journey,” at just the right time in my life. I was delighted to see her new collection, “Upstream,” and I was not disappointed. Surprised a bit by the prose format, but not disappointed. The trick is to read these entries as if they were in “poetical” form, that is broken down into short lines, to be read slowly and savored, not your usual essays that you can gloss over with some version of speed-reading, grabbing for the main concept and not the subtleties of language and imagery. As with “proper” poetry, the journey is the heart of the piece, and phrases that ring in the mind like sweet bells or brash sirens can be found everywhere. The poems form a loose sort of journey centered around a cabin in the woods near a pond (somewhere in New England, I suppose), through the seasons and with digressions into the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others. I love what she has to say about them and how — especially in the cases of Emerson and Whitman — she weaves those observations into the context of the natural world that was theirs as well. Just as “The Journey” struck me in the right way at the right time, Upstream carried me along through the final illness and death of our dog. Not a big thing in the grand scheme of things, but neither is a turtle laying her eggs, a wounded gull, or building a little house by hand, or any of the other things portrayed so beautifully in Oliver’s work.

Mary Oliver is a writer known for her poems that praise the beauty of nature. In Upstream, she uses essays to examine her favorite writers and extol the ways that nature can give us hope and put things in perspective. For the reader familiar with her poems, it should be no surprise that her prose is sparse and beautiful. Some of the earlier essays deal with Oliver's childhood discovery that both the quiet forest and the pages of a book could offer companionship. Another essay holds her musings on the nature of creativity and the meeting of hard, regular work and the spark of inspiration. Some essays focus solely on the life of animals, like fish and turtles and even a single spider, as she reports her observations.

As always, reading words from Mary Oliver is a balm for the soul. These essays are a reminder for each of us to pay attention to our lives, to the small joys of every day, and to the wonders of nature all around us.


Upstream: Selected Essays
By Mary Oliver
Penguin Press October 2016
178 pages
Read via Netgalley