Owls and Different Fantasies: Poems and Essays

Filled with joy, pain and wonder
Another compilation of poems and essays, including a handful of new ones, in this case all about birds. Oliver is simply amazing. She makes subjects you may not care about feel meaningful and inspiring and filled with, for lack of a better word from my atheist brain, grace. While all of the essays are short and powerful, I especially liked the one about caring for a crippled gull she found on the beach for three months one winter. She called him Bird: “He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not fact, this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.” Of course, then he dies and rips your heart out. And here’s an excerpt from a poem flipped to at random, called “Catbird”: “Since I see him every morning, I have rewarded myself the pleasure of thinking that he knows me./ Yet never once has he answered my nod./ He seems, in fact, to find in me a kind of humor, I am so vast, uncertain and strange./ I am the one who comes and goes, and who knows why./ Will I ever understand him?/ Certainly he will never understand me, or the world I come from./ For he will never sing for the kingdom of dollars./ For he will never grow pockets in his gray wings.” Grade: A

That nature is constantly corresponding with us
She is quoted by so many writers so was curious. Yes, I am enjoying the poems, reading them slowly and not all at once. And the drawing of feathers, beautiful!! I’m sure I will be re-reading them.

My Introduction to Mary Oliver
If you are new to Mary Oliver, this is a great place to start.Try going to You-Tube and catch a video of others perform readings from this collection.Wild Geese & Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond are personal favorties.

Poems that teach
Beautiful poems that instruct AND make the reader appreciate the birds…and the language.

The pleasure of deepening the relationship to anything she writes about.

Mary Oliver writes about the American countryside and its nature. This collection rates highly alongside her other work. Her writing style is sparse but each sentence matters. I bought this collection because it included ‘White owl flies into and out of the field’: a brief poem about an owl making a kill in winter which then develops themes about life and death. The sort of thing you could read at a commemoration, perhaps. For me, her poems tend to be relatively short but powerful and haunting – or perhaps those are the ones that lure me in.

Some excellent bird poems and a brilliant essay on owls. I came across Mary Oliver’s poetry when I went on a bird walk with a National Park Ranger in Tuolumne Meadows in California last summer. He read out The Dipper in the course of the walk and everybody was captivated by it. I simply cannot understand why she is not better known in Britain.