“This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready / to break my heart” Well, Mary, it seems that you have something in common with your subject matter. 

As the resident bookworm in each of my social circles, I’m often asked for book recommendations. I’m no mind reader, so I like to ask for a certain mood or what the person wants to get out of it. As good as it is, I wouldn’t recommend Anna Karenina if you’re looking for a beach read. If you want something gripping, I’ll suggest Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. If you want something dry and biting, I’ll lend you The Idiot by Elif Batuman. If you’re looking for a feel-good read, I’ll offer Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting by Claire Pooley. If you want a full cast of fully developed characters, I’ll put forth the Beartown trilogy by Fredrik Backman. Every once in a while, I get the kind of request that used to make me stop and think. That was before I discovered the poet who would challenge my worldview and change my life. Now, when I get a request for something to break your heart, I recommend Devotions, the selected poems of Mary Oliver. 

You may be wondering about what could be so gut-wrenching about trees, ponds, foxes, and birds. While Oliver primarily focuses her words on the natural world, she does so from a unique perspective. Oliver is a keen observer of the overlooked, the quiet instances of nature that don’t grace the cover of National Geographic. In doing so, she allows herself to be overlooked as ‘author,’ creating a direct line between reader and subject. Mary Oliver’s poems straddle the lines between human and nature, sorrow and joy, predator and prey, and life and death, reader and author. In this, she redefines what it means to truly be in either category, and challenges whether they must exist in binary. She employs this position strategically, using the motions of an egret to comment on the imminence of death or the life cycle of flowers to reflect on what it means to live a meaningful life. Oliver presents a certain type of sadness that other poets fail to capture. There is a unique sorrow associated with the realization that you haven’t been living life all the way. That you haven’t loved this world, this life, this planet, enough. That you have treated joy like a crumb. Maybe you struggle with the sense of finality that she employs so nonchalantly. Oliver doesn’t hesitate to remind us that we will all die one day. It’s scary to see someone so at ease with their fate. Perhaps your soul yearns to be one with nature, you see the wonder in the world and long to be a part of it. If this is true, then I apologize for recommending a poem that realizes “so this is the world / I’m not in it / It is beautiful.”

Why would anyone want to read something that will break their heart? Well, I’ve been saving my ace, and no, it’s not that everyone I know is a literary masochist. If you are able to sit in the discomfort that reading my favourite poet requires — if you can wrestle with your fears of death, the unknown, and everything in between; if you can learn to love both her words and this earth — then you should know that this is not all. Reading Mary Oliver will break your heart, but it will also heal your heart. Sure, Oliver admits that “there are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed.” But she also knows that “still, life has some possibility left.” The beauty of Oliver’s work lies in between the breaking and the healing. This area of uncertainty and sorrow and joy and hope and terror and courage, this purgatory of human existence, is reflective. It shows us how to exist in a world that we have spent generations distancing ourselves from. It presents us with our greatest fears, acting as a kind of exposure therapy. Oliver was able to “love this world…as though it’s the last chance [she is] ever going to get / to be alive / and know it,” because she knew it. What’s more, she didn’t keep this love to herself. She immortalized it in poetry, allowing her work to be a bastion of love and gratitude. It’s terrifying to think that this is our last chance to be alive, but it’s worth it to marry the amazement and take the world into our arms when we finally accept our own mortality. 

Poems referenced (in order of appearance): 

Peonies 

Heron Rises From the Dark, Summer Pond 

Don’t Hesitate 

When Death Comes 

In Blackwater Woods

Illustration by Sydney Hanson