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.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.