Today, September 10, is the birthday of Mary Oliver, the late poet and nature writer!
In addition to being a renowned poet, she also published numerous essays. A collection of many of these Mary Oliver essays was published in 2016: Upstream: Selected Essays.
In honor of Mary Oliver’s birthday, we offer the following list of ten of the finest Mary Oliver essays that can be read online (a few of these are not the full essay, but a significant excerpt)!
Enjoy these essays!!!
Mary Oliver
Reading Her Poems
Flow
Published in Long Life: Essays and Other Writings
via Google Books
This enormity, this cauldron of changing greens and blues, is the great palace of the earth. Everything is in it – monsters, devils, jewels, swimming angels, soft-eyes mammals that unhesitatingly exchange looks with us as we stand on the shore; also, sunk with some ship or during off-loading, artifacts of past decades or centuries; also the outpourings of fire under water, the lava trails; and the kelp fields, coral shelves, and so many other secrets – the remembered and faithfully repeated recitations of the whales, the language of dolphins – and the multitude itself, the numbers and the kinds of shark, seal, worm, vegetations, and fish: cod, haddock, swordfish, hake, also the lavender sculpin, the chisel-mouth, the goldeye, the puffer, the tripletail, the star-gazing minnow. How can we not know that, already, we live in paradise?
[ Read the full essay ]
(Pops in New Window)
<<<<<< Prev. Essay |
Next Essay >>>>>>

![]() Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |