Upstream: Selected Essays

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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.” — Mary Oliver Say what now?? Wha?? I literally read these two sentences about ten times in a row, then brought the book to my husband and read them aloud and asked, "Is she saying what I think she's saying?"

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Highly recommended as an entrée to Oliver’s works, this volume should also be required reading for artists of all kinds, not just writers, and especially aspiring creative minds.”— Library Journal (starred review) The world seems to spin too fast for us to slow down, but slowing down is just the thing that would help us find our footing. I enjoyed some more than others, purely because I had more interest in the topics discussed, rather than some being of weaker constitution than others. All had a transcendent and divine tone to them that felt like meditation in the written form. The essays concerning natural elements were of particular evocative delight. What Mary wrote here was a collection of rambling thoughts in beautiful prose and slapped the word essays on it as if that’s reason enough for people to read. Well, it might have been enough to say, “This my free association about turtles today!” and then maybe I wouldn’t have been so disappointed. many places and in so many ways. But also the universe is brisk and businesslike, and no doubt does not give its delicate landscapes or its thunderous displays of power, and perhaps perception, too, for our sakes or our improvement.Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Art by Maurice Sendak for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales

Mary Oliver on How Books Saved Her Life and Staying Alive: Mary Oliver on How Books Saved Her Life and

New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1983, pp. 10, 22; November 25, 1990, p. 24; December 13, 1992, p. 12. In Ohio, in the 1950s, I had a few friends who kept me sane, alert, and loyal to my own best and wildest inclinations. My town was no more or less congenial to the fact of poetry than any other small town in America—I make no special case of a solitary childhood. Estrangement from the mainstream of that time and place was an unavoidable precondition, no doubt, to the life I was choosing from among all the lives possible to me. Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do — fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.

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This is a selection of essays, written in a beautiful and abstract style, concerning a variety of topics; from the history of Emmerson, the laying of turtle eggs in the sand, Poe’s concern over the uncertainty of the universe and the adventures of a common house spider.

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The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self — and does — is a darker and more curious matter. With an eye to how the enlivening power of this “passion for work” slowly and steadily superseded the deadening weight of her circumstances, Oliver issues an incantation almost as a note to herself whispered into the margins: Echoing Keats’s notion of “negative capability,” Dani Shapiro’s insistence that the artist’s task is “to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it,” and Georgia O’Keeffe’s counsel that as an artist you ought to be “keeping the unknown always beyond you,” Oliver considers the central commitment of the creative life — that of making uncertainty and the unknown the raw material of art: It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.” — Mary Oliver, InvitationOliver immerses us in an ever-widening circle, in which a shrub or flower opens onto the cosmos, revealing our meager, masterful place in it. Hold Upstreamin your hands, and you hold a miracle of ravishing imagery and startling revelation.”— Minneapolis Star Tribune The richness of these essays—part revelation, part instruction—will prompt readers to dive in again and again.” — The Washington Post Echoing young Sylvia Plath’s insistence on writing as salvation for the soul, Oliver takes a lucid look at the nuanced nature of such self-salvation through creative work and considers what it means to save one’s own life:

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Upstream is a collection I can definitely see myself revisiting and I look forward to reading more from Mary Oliver. I think it holds a wealth of inspiration for introspection and there are pieces of it that are still tumbling around my head and working themselves into all sorts of channels. Pieces that need to continually traipse about my mind in lewdly luminescent & emboldened letters as a consistent reminder such as,

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Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. ” — Mary Oliver, Mysteries, Yes I wanted to read Oliver beyond her most popular, so I started with Upstream: Selected Essays and A Thousand Mornings.)