Absence Makes the Heart
January 15, 2025
Book Review of Devotions by Mary Oliver
Reviewed by Svetlana Litvinchuk
Survey today’s contemporary poets and you’ll find among them a common thread: Mary Oliver is on nearly everyone’s list of most influential poets. Indeed, there is much to love about her. A Pulitzer-winning best-selling poet, she remains accessible, her voice coming through like an old familiar friend and mentor— conversational and meditative. Her poems are reminiscent of the sorts of pensive thoughts that might arise from a morning walk in the woods, where it is clear many of her poems are written. Casual as they are eloquent, they often read like one part diary entry and one part naturalist observation.
But in her prolific 54-year poetry career in which she published over three dozen books, one thing that doesn’t appear much is other humans. In, Devotions, her 417-page collection of her best previously published works, what becomes apparent is what is largely omitted: for all the love in her poetry the best of her work is not about romance or heartbreak. That isn’t to say she never wrote of romantic love—she did. But, the pieces that set her apart from other poets and the work for which she is best known, are solitary in nature, exploring the her love of the Earth instead. Oliver writes about love the way one writes about the sun— without staring directly at it. What consumes so much of the life and inspiration of other poets, relationships, was, in her work, peripheral at most and at times completely absent altogether. How remarkable for a poet who is so universally loved and who was so in love with life.
This must be what Rae Armantrout was alluding to when she said in #3 of ONLY POEMS Sessions— for a poem to be truly enduring it must be about something bigger than heartbreak. About this Oliver says: “Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers, and therefore unsuitable… if you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.”
She acknowledges: “I do not live happily nor comfortably with the cleverness of our time. The talk is all about computers, the news is all about bombs and blood. This morning in the fresh field I came upon a hidden nest. It held four warm, speckled eggs. I touched them. Then went away softly, having felt something more wonderful than all the electricity of New York City.”
Her poems provide a quiet and contemplative place in nature without other humans, only her as our guide, but they are more than that. As she communes with nature in her own private and reverent way, the questions she asks are not entirely rhetorical in nature—she seems to be asking the reader directly, asking us to respond in the way we conduct our lives. As we realize she is talking to us, we find ourselves accompanying her into the woods, along for the ride, to hear what wisdom the river has to impart as Oliver acts as interpreter. This is the timeless secret of her connection with all who read her books: her willingness to share her love of the world with us means she must love us very much.
Despite the omission of romance within the pages of her books, Oliver fills her works with an immense love for the world. She writes the way I envision she conducts her morning walks: “so light-footed, so casual.” Of course, as with any spiritual work that perseveres, her poems must find grounding in the world applicable to humans. And she does, again and again.
Through nature, she teaches us that “there are many ways to perish, or to flourish. How old pain, for example, can stall us at the threshold of function…Still, friends, consider stone, that is without the fret of gravity, and water that is without anxiety. And the pine trees that never forget the recipe for renewal… this is the world. And consider always every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles. Listen. We all have so much listening to do. Tear the sand away. And listen. The river is singing.”
Reading her poetry is as close as some of us will ever get to reaching enlightenment. She acts as an intermediary between the natural world and digital world. Her poetry is a great unifier, an attempt to balance the destruction inherent in the modernization of life and all its complicated relationships. She is a priestess and translator for the river; she is, as we all are: “a part of holiness.”
“We do not live in a simple world… I pray for the desperate world. I do the little each person can do, it isn’t much. Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves.”
Of the river singing, she tells us, “you don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day. You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears. And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway, through all the traffic, and ambition.” Perhaps the clarity of her work is precisely because she does not muddy these messages from nature by involving the world of human relationships. There is enough to learn from trees and stones and her canine friends, so she sticks with what is universal. Her voice so tirelessly translating nature to those of us fortunate enough to venture into the woods with her.
Thank you, Mary Oliver, for all those years of taking us on your walks in the woods with you, for teaching us what a river can be— “a friend, a companion, a hint of heaven.” Thank you for your wisdom, you say it isn’t much, but to so many of us, it is everything.
Mary Oliver is the author of 33 books of poetry and prose. Among her many honors are the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters Achievement Award. Other awards include the Lannan Literary Award, Christopher and L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, Poetry Society of America’s Shelly Memorial Prize, and the Pioneer Award from the Santa Monica Public Library Green Prize for Sustainable Literature. She received Honorary Doctorates from The Art Institute of Boston, Dartmouth College, Marquette University, and Tufts University. She taught at many colleges and universities, including: Case Western Reserve University; Bennington College, where she held the Catherine Osgood Foster Chair For Distinguished Teaching; Bucknell University; and, Sweet Briar College, where she was Margaret Banister Writer in Residence.