Devotions
Devotions is the career-spanning selection Oliver assembled herself, drawn from fifty years and more than a dozen volumes. The great democratizing poet of the American nature tradition, her attentiveness to the world — grasshoppers, geese, black bears, mornings — is Thoreauvian without the aloofness. "The Summer Day" holds the most quoted question in contemporary American poetry: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" She has introduced more non-readers to poetry than perhaps any other American poet.
Reading two hundred-plus poems from a fifty-year career back to back exposes how narrow her range is; a New Yorker critic says the concentration on nature and the spiritual “ultimately flattens Oliver's range” in a way a slim volume never would. Fellow poets dismiss the work outright as “shallow and sentimental,” citing its “digestibility, earnestness, and apparent disinterest in other people” as proof of a craft failure rather than a style. One historical charge keeps recurring: that Oliver “seemed not to know about modernism,” judged against the century she supposedly ignored. Her own mass popularity gets held against her, treated as evidence she isn't doing serious literary work rather than as a mark in her favor. Even an admirer preferred dipping in over reading straight through, since the nature imagery blurs poem to poem.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
