The World Is Still Calling: Reading Mary Oliver

I came to Mary Oliver later in life--for whatever reason, she was never someone we studied or incountered in school. Poetry wasn’t much of an emphasis in either my high school or undergraduate years, and it took me some time to find my way to her.

I’ve come to appreciate her while walking the dog, wandering the beaches in Michigan, or prowling about in the woods in Maine. Her writing comes back to me in those places. There’s something deceptively simple about it—a clarity that makes you pause, then realize how much she has managed to say.

Right now, in autumn, the smell of wet leaves is so strong. It’s familiar and somehow moving, though I’d have a hard time explaining exactly why. I think that’s part of what draws me to her poetry. She gives words to something we recognize in nature, something we feel before we know how to explain it.

That’s why I wanted to share her here. I’m still discovering her, and finding that her poems give me more to notice on walks I would have taken anyway.

A life spent looking closely

Mary Oliver was born in Ohio in 1935 and began writing poetry as a teenager.  Her collection American Primitive won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984; New and Selected Poems received the National Book Award in 1992. She died in 2019, leaving a body of poetry and prose that continues to find its way into readers’ lives. PBS offers a fuller timeline of her life and work.

Those are the milestones. There is also the daily practice behind them: walking, looking, listening, and finding language precise enough to hold what she had noticed.

In her 2015 conversation with Krista Tippett for On Being, Oliver described carrying notebooks on her walks, jotting down thoughts and working them into poems later. She spoke, too, about the importance of showing up to write and the considerable work of revision. The apparent ease on the page was something she worked for.

That helps explain why her simplicity is so satisfying. A poem can be immediately welcoming and still reward a second or third reading. We recognize the tree, the bird, the familiar feeling. Then we begin to notice how carefully she has led us there.

Beauty with room for sorrow

There is a temptation, when a writer offers so much beauty, to imagine that beauty came easily to her. Oliver’s own account is more complicated. In the same interview, she spoke of a painful childhood and of the refuge she found in the woods and in poetry. Her relationship with the natural world had the force of something necessary.

For me, that knowledge makes room for a deeper reading. Consolation means something different when it comes from a person acquainted with suffering. Her poems can meet a reader who is tired, lonely, or uncertain without requiring that reader to arrive in a better mood.

A walk does not undo a loss. A lovely afternoon cannot settle every worry. Yet there are moments when something outside ourselves reaches us: the sudden smell of rain, a bird moving in the undergrowth, the shape of branches newly visible after the leaves have fallen. We may still carry everything we brought with us. We have also noticed something else.

Oliver’s work gives that encounter its due. A few minutes of attention can matter enormously. It can remind us that our private concerns exist within a living world, and that we remain part of it.

“Wild Geese”: an invitation to belong

“Wild Geese,” published in Dream Work in 1986, is a particularly moving place to begin. Its opening addresses the reader with startling directness. Before there is a landscape, there is a person who needs to hear something.

As the poem unfolds, the view widens. Private despair sits alongside rain, trees, mountains, and birds in flight. The sorrow is acknowledged; the world continues. By the end, the cry overhead has become an invitation to recognize our place within it.

Here is the poem, to read slowly.

Wild Geese

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese,” from Dream Work (1986). Text transcribed from the image supplied for this article.

What stays with me is the way the poem makes belonging feel possible. We are accustomed to earning our place in so many areas of life: doing enough, getting things right, being useful. Here, the natural world offers a different measure. We are living creatures ourselves, with bodies, longings, and the need for company.

Even the sound of the geese matters. It is an unmistakable, carrying cry, the kind that interrupts a thought and makes us lift our heads. Oliver allows it to remain wild. The comfort comes from being called back into the world.

Beyond the familiar lines

Many readers first encounter Oliver through a quotation. A few words arrive on a card, in a letter, or at just the right moment in a conversation. That can be the beginning of a lasting relationship with a writer. There is particular pleasure, though, in following those words back to the whole poem.

“The Summer Day” is a good example. Its famous closing question about our brief and precious lives grows out of a close encounter with a grasshopper. Before we reach that question, Oliver has spent time watching a creature move, eat, and clean itself. The attention is patient and specific.

Read in that setting, the ending feels less like a demand to make an impressive life and more like an invitation to inhabit the life already in front of us. An afternoon spent noticing has its own value. It does not have to produce anything to have been well spent.

Another poem worth seeking out is “When I Am Among the Trees.” In it, the trees offer the speaker a different pace. One brief phrase, “Stay awhile,” feels especially apt beside a woodland path. There is time to stop here.

The poem also makes room for the distance between the person we hope to be and the person hurrying through the day. That is a familiar distance. The woods offer an opportunity to pause within it, to be present without first having everything resolved.

For those of us near the forest preserves, this is an invitation we can accept close to home. There needn’t be a journey to a spectacular landscape. An ordinary path, the same stand of trees, the changing light at the end of the day: these offer plenty to attend to.

Watch: Mary Oliver on PBS

The American Masters documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World offers another way to spend time with her life and work. The film brings together her story, interviews, and readings of her poems, with contributors including Ada Limón, Maria Shriver, and John Waters, and readers including Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Colbert, and Oprah Winfrey.

Watch Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World on PBS →

Hearing poetry spoken aloud changes the experience. A pause can become audible; a familiar sentence can surprise us again. If you have come to Oliver mainly through the printed page, the film offers an opportunity to listen as well as read.

For a further encounter with her own voice, her conversation with Krista Tippett on On Being is well worth setting aside time for.

Two ways to bring her words home

At Clever Girl, we have two books that offer different ways to continue this conversation: a collection to read and return to, and a journal that leaves space for your own observations.

Little Alleluias: Collected Poetry and Prose

With a foreword by Natalie Diaz, Little Alleluias brings together The Leaf and the Cloud, What Do We Know, and essays from Long Life. It offers a chance to spend time with both Oliver’s poetry and her prose, moving between different forms of her attention.

This is the book I would place beside a comfortable chair, to open when there is time for a few pages. It also makes a thoughtful introduction for someone who wants to move beyond the familiar quotations and discover more of her writing.

Explore Little Alleluias at Clever Girl →

This Wild and Precious Life: A Journal

This Wild and Precious Life is an illustrated journal featuring quotations from Oliver’s work, occasional complete poems, and questions that invite a written response. It gives you space to consider what you have noticed and what has stayed with you.

You needn’t consider yourself a writer to use it. A sentence about the morning’s walk is enough. So is a description of the light, a remembered conversation, or the name of a bird you finally looked up. Over time, those observations become a record of your own attention.

Explore This Wild and Precious Life at Clever Girl →

On the next walk

Perhaps, as you’re out walking this fall, you’ll hear the stray cry of a goose overhead and think of her words. You might stop for a moment, look up through the branches, and follow the sound until you find the birds.

The dog will still want to keep moving. There will still be things waiting for you at home. But for a moment, with the smell of wet leaves rising around you and that call carrying across the sky, the poem may feel very close.

That is what I appreciate about coming to Mary Oliver now. Her words accompany the life I’m already living. They return on a familiar path and help me recognize something I might otherwise have hurried past.

—Katie

Further reading and sources: PBS: biography and career timeline; PBS: the documentary; On Being: Mary Oliver in conversation with Krista Tippett; Academy of American Poets: “The Summer Day”; Lincoln Park Conservancy: “When I Am Among the Trees”. Book contents checked against the publishers’ descriptions: Hachette and Penguin Random House.