Dream Work

Dream Work, a collection of forty-five poems, follows both chronologically and logically Mary Oliver's American Primitive, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for the finest book of poetry published in 1983 by an American poet. The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness—so steadfast and radiant in American Primitive—continue in Dream Work. She has turned her attention in these poems to the solitary and difficult labors of the spirit—to accepting the truth about one's personal world, and to v...

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xenyaqn16 июля 2018 г.
remarkable poetry
I'm really happy that I've stumbled upon this collection of poems. I've never read anything by Mary Oliver before and this book was sort of an introduction into her writing. And I will definitely continue reading her poems in the future.
The major theme of this collection, as I see it, is the continuity of nature and human spirit and the insights that people could get out of this co-/inter-existence. We can learn a lot from nature, albeit quite hard mostly due to our self-centeredness. Thankfully, some of us take their time to mindfully look around themselves, and Mary Oliver is one of those few. Although sometimes she comes to some eerie conclusions:
For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
"Don't love your life
too much". it said,
and vanished
into the world.
Mary Oliver doesn't see nature as an opponent, some powerful force to be fought against. She is quite calm and confident about it, probably, because she sees herself as its part and doesn't feel any hostility on its side, so she says:
Whatever
power of the earth rampages, we turn to it
dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever
the name of the catastrophe, it is never
the opposite of love.
Also, I've noticed that she is often very present in there, by which I mean that she doesn't merely observe nature, but acts in it. This is something that I don't normally find in poetry (probably because I don't read a lot of it))).
Apart from that, she writes about a father/daughter relationship, creative spirit, writers/art, life in general, and our place in the space-time continuum.
To conclude, I loved the book).
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virgoslibrary5 мая 2023 г.
If I stopped and thought, maybe the world can’t be saved, the pain was unbearable.

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robot4 января 2025 г.
I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.
— from Dogfish
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virgoslibrary5 мая 2023 г.
The way I’d like to go on living in this world wouldn’t hurt anything, I’d just go on walking uphill and downhill, looking around, and so what if half the time I don’t know what for.
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