Literature for Hiking #1 - Mary Oliver (Poetry)

In my first blog post I quoted Mary Oliver, an American poet born in 1935 who died only recently in 2019. If you are not familiar with her poems and you love nature and being outdoors, I cannot recommend her highly enough. A celebrated, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Oliver had a uniquely powerful take on the natural world, our humble place within it and our relationship to the animals who allow us to spend time in their spaces.

If you read about Oliver on the Poetry Foundation site, you will see a beautiful interview with Maxine Kumin, who explains Oliver’s work with lucidity and passion: “Oliver’s poetry focused on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, ‘lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.’…[she] stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.”

I have always loved a wild a rugged landscape and when I encounter works of literature that can capture how it feels to stand in those wind-battered spaces of beauty, I am lost. Talented wordsmithing has the power to stun and captivate like a glorious panorama of a sunset over the mountains and peaks. Undoubtedly one of America’s most brilliant wordsmiths, Oliver’s poetry captures the haunting, raw, magnificent possibilities of nature.

Oliver approaches nature with a childish curiosity, the desire to look “inside / the darkness / of a shell folded like pastry” in ‘The Hermit Crab.’ When the poem ends it becomes something more profound, illuminating the way a closer look at nature can offer us something beautiful but fleeting: “I scarcely had time to see it, / gleaming.” Throughout her poems, as Kumin notes, there is a slipperiness in the boundaries and bonds between humans, animals and the natural world. As she writes in one of my personal favourites, ‘Wild Geese’, “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Although Oliver was incredibly private, her long-term partner was another woman, Molly Malone Cook.

If you are a hiker that walks with a dog, or if you have ever had the privilege of having a dog in your life, I strongly recommend Oliver’s collection ‘Dog Songs.’ This bittersweet collection will have you laughing, crying and clinging on to every last word. My own favourite, ‘The Sweetness of Dogs’, never fails to make me choke up. “Percy, meanwhile, / leans against me and gazes up / into my face. As though I were just as wonderful / as the perfect moon.” I recommend reading the whole poem if you want to feel the kind of warm gulp of emotion that takes hold and never quite lets go. Darling dogs. Oliver captures every humorous, paw-in-hand moment of unshakable loyalty and life-long devotion.

One of Oliver’s most quoted lines is from ‘The Summer Day’ which asks “what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” It is a lofty question indeed, prompted by the grasshopper “gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.” It is the kind of question Oliver's poems provoke in a way that is almost unexpected, when they confront you at the end of reading. Her poetry lingers, needles, whispers and calls to you like the wildlife that saturate her verses.

There are countless other poems where Oliver captures both the fragility and power of life, nature and the natural world, including works such as ‘The Swan’ and ‘Starlings in Winter.’ If you are somebody yet to explore any poetry, but you spend hours in those quiet and splendid parts of the world that humble and inspire us, I would definitely recommend a journey through Oliver’s poems. Perhaps on a rainy day, in a tent, when the heavens open and everything is damp and grotty, yet somehow still lush and impossibly beautiful.