Yesterday was the first anniversary of the death of Mary Oliver, one of my favourite poets…maybe favourite. I gave a talk on her last week so pulled two of her books off my shelf and read them finally. Upstream is a collection of essays and Devotions a selection of poetry from many of her books.

Both are beautiful books. It is in Upstream that Mary Oliver writes her oft quoted remark that attention is the beginning of devotion. There is a triptych of essays on creatures she pays attention to that are especially moving: a spider, a wounded gull, and an owl. It was the essay on the wounded gull in which she describes all of their efforts to care for it until ultimately it died that gutted me: “We grew fond. We grew into that perilous place: we grew fond.”

Devotions is a wonderful read…it includes all her famous poems, like “The Summer Day” and “When Death Comes” but it also introduced me to poems I didn’t know. I have read that there have been critics who dismiss her poetry as too simple, essentially as not intellectual enough, but what struck me reading so many of her poems at one time is how often what starts as a description of some wildlife becomes a moral claim on your life. If you truly see then you shall be changed. In an interview with Krista Tippet she said she cared very much about climate change but she thought you could catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If she could help people fall in love with the world around them then perhaps they might try to save it. But then there is also this poem:

Lead

Here is a story

to break your heart.

Are you willing?

This winter

the loons came to our harbor

and died, one by one,

of nothing we could see.

A friend told me

of one on the shore

that lifted its head and opened

the elegant beak and cried out

in the long, sweet savoring of its life

which, if you have heard it,

you know is a sacred thing,

and for which, if you have not heard it,

you had better hurry to where

they still sing.

And, believe me, tell no one

just where that is.

The next morning

this loon, speckled

and iridescent and with a plan

to fly home

to some hidden lake,

was dead on the shore.

I tell you this

to break your heart,

by which I mean only

that it break open and never close again

to the rest of the world.