Dream Work

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).