I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. ISBN 9781594206702 (hardcover), 178p.įTC Full Disclosure – I bought my copy of the book.''In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. “Or maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.” She says the story could have several morals. My favorite essay is called “Ropes” about a dog who wouldn’t stay home. Her awareness is evident in stories of a gull, the turtles, the spider. It makes for an awareness of a person’s own aging, and eventual disappearance from the world. The observance of nature also means an observance of the cycle of life. There’s a little melancholy to Mary Oliver’s essays. She examines their lives and their connections to their works, just as she examines her own need for nature as she writes. She discusses Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Wordsworth. In section 3, Oliver seems to make a departure from her essays about her existence when she discusses earlier writers. And one door led her to a natural world that was as essential to her survival as air. Without going into detail about her childhood, she indicates she’s alive today because she found ways to escape. Books and nature were her escape as a child, and they still serve the same purpose. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” Time and again, Oliver uses doors and houses and foxes as she observes the world.

She says, “I could not be a poet without the natural world. Oliver is a poet who also writes essays, in this case a collection about her close connection to nature. However, I’m a fan of essays, and with a recommendation of Mary Oliver, I picked up her recent bestseller, Upstream.

I don’t often read what critics call “literature”. But, I respect the turn of a phrase, the rhythm, the poetic handling of words in an essay. A friend asked me if I read poetry, and I said not really.

Upstream by mary oliver