Devotions
Devotions is the career-spanning selection Oliver assembled herself, drawn from fifty years and more than a dozen volumes. The great democratizing poet of the American nature tradition, her attentiveness to the world — grasshoppers, geese, black bears, mornings — is Thoreauvian without the aloofness. "The Summer Day" holds the most quoted question in contemporary American poetry: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" She has introduced more non-readers to poetry than perhaps any other American poet.
Oliver wrote the same poem for fifty years: walk out, see a creature, receive an epiphany, end on an instruction about your one wild life. Selected by the poet herself, Devotions includes too much of the later, thinner work and runs in reverse chronology, so you begin at the weakest end. Best taken five poems at a time.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
