I am reading Upstream, a collection of essays by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver, who died earlier this year. She talks about some of her favorite poets, including Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe, but her main focus is on nature and our relation to it. Just after Oliver’s death in January, Stephanie Burt wrote in The New Yorker (January 24, 2019) of Oliver’s long life in and around Cape Cod:
“That environment gave rise to poem after poem and book after book (nearly thirty, all told) of secular psalms, inquiries into nature, and reasons to go on living. “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
Oliver put it this way: “The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.”
Mary Oliver is gone, but her message must continue to be heard.
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