Poetry Devotions

A New York Times Bestseller, chosen as Oprah's "Books That Help Me Through" for Oprah's Book Club “No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love, from Oliver's exuberant dog poems to selections from the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive, and Dream Work, one of her exceptional collections. Perhaps more important, the luminous writing provides respite from our crazy world and demonstrates how mindfulness can define and transform a life, moment by moment, poem by poem.” —The Washington Post “It’s as if the poet herself has sidled beside the reader and pointed us to the poems she considers most worthy of deep consideration.” —Chicago Tribune Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career. Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

"These poems visit high schools, laundromats, motels, films, and dreams in order to measure the American hunger and thirst. They are interested in the things we profess to hold most dear as well as what's unspoken and unbidden. While we're receiving a call or while we're passing through an X-ray machine, the personal is intersected--sometimes violently, sometimes tenderly--with the hum and buzz of the culture. Whether in New York or Tuscaloosa, Seattle or Philadelphia, past or present, the culture carries the burden of race and 'someone's idea of beauty.'"--Book cover.

Poems of Devotion is a collection of the finest recent poems in the devotional mode, which the editor examines in detail in the introductory essay. The seventy-seven poets collected here demonstrate the ongoing vitality of poetry as a spiritual practice, in the long tradition of poets, psalmists, and mystics from the East and West. This is an anthology that will prove deeply rewarding in the classroom, at home, or in the library of your religious institution.

In Weak Devotions, his first poetry collection, Luke Hankins engages with great honesty the difficulties and uncertainties inherent in the spiritual life. Far from seeking mere "self-expression," Hankins has honed these explorations into tightly knit meditations and monologues that will resonate with the deepest questions and longings of readers of all backgrounds.

Featuring a moment in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England before the disciplinary divisions that we inherit today were established, Empiricist Devotions recovers a kind of empiricist thinking in which the techniques and emphases of science, religion, and literature combined and cooperated. This brand of empiricism was committed to particularized scrutiny and epistemological modesty. It was Protestant in its enabling premises and meditative practices. It earnestly affirmed that figurative language provided crucial tools for interpreting the divinely written world. Smith recovers this empiricism in Robert Boyle’s analogies, Isaac Newton’s metaphors, John Locke’s narratives, Joseph Addison’s personifications, Daniel Defoe’s diction, John Gay’s periphrases, and Alexander Pope’s descriptive particulars. She thereby demonstrates that "literary" language played a key role in shaping and giving voice to the concerns of eighteenth-century science and religion alike. Empiricist Devotions combines intellectual history with close readings of a wide variety of texts, from sermons, devotional journals, and economic tracts to georgic poems, it-narratives, and microscopy treatises. This prizewinning book has important implications for our understanding of cultural and literary history, as scholars of the period’s science have not fully appreciated figurative language’s central role in empiricist thought, while scholars of its religion and literature have neglected the serious empiricist commitments motivating richly figurative devotional and poetic texts. Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an Outstanding Work of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Philip Terman's latest poetry collection, THIS CRAZY DEVOTION, begins appropriately enough with "Tormented Meshuggenehs," "the crazy sages... / who dervished across the hayfields / and paused to yawp a parable to the cows about the seven beggars..." This passage announces much about the poetry that follows: that its craziness indeed is of the order of devotion in the spiritual sense, rooted in Judaism; and also that it often takes place in bucolic surroundings, rooted in the land. And why is this a little surprising, this conjunction of Jewish life and rural setting? For Terman they are seamless and sacred, and by portraying his Jewishness as woven through a life and landscape familiar to many (non-Jewish) readers, he dispels stereotypes and creates a community of mutual recognition and understanding. That would be virtue enough to applaud this collection, but it offers many other pleasures. "I am talking about this world, there is no other," he declares in the long and lovely meditative "Garden Chronicle" that forms the final section of the book. Such a world it is, full of all of the things to which he is crazily devoted, all of the things he writes about with such acuity and tenderness in these poems: heritage and faith, social justice, poetry, and even (in the title poem) almost meeting Bob Dylan--but foremost, his family and nature, both of which sustain him. He communes with ancestors, a grandfather he was too young to remember, who must have sung to him in Yiddish (and who, he supposes, just might have posed for Chagall). He imagines the radio interview his father might have given, replete with Borscht Belt humor, and recalls going for bagels with "the schlemiel... / who dated your sister-in-law / after your brother died." He devotes the second section, "Of Longing and Chutzpah," to memories of his mother, and in one of the most humorous and poignant moments recalls how in childhood his mother cut his hair to save money, an act Terman likens to "sculpting" him into all the things she might have wished him to be, "the boy she wants to be a mensch." (Based on the accounting he gives here, she succeeded. She also carved out a considerable poet.) Most of all, he writes of "The love of the long married," of children "at the kitchen table / doing homework," waiting on a school bus which arrives bearing all the hopes and happiness in the world. He gives the last word to the daughter whose question "After Later?" signifies "no set time, farther than the horizon, / on top of the sky, around the bend, outside this moment we're in" when, perhaps "all those things they said would happen / must surely have occurred." Such a lovely description of faith, so worthy of devotion.

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. In WINTER: EFFULGENCES AND DEVOTIONS, Sarah Vap documents the obstacles to writing a single poem over a twelve-year period. Her account becomes a confrontation with the insidious, radiating, pliant character of late capitalism. She encounters it as a rootless system, an airborne contagion, a toxin in the walls of our homes. Pursuing her distractions across the years, Vap makes certain commitments: to remember the wars that her country is waging, which are meant to be invisible to her; to mourn the deaths of whales by sonar; to hear though she is deaf; to be present for the loss of winter, as she knows it, from earth; and to herself, a profane and multifarious creature who possibly has a soul. Reeling from the nonstop "competition" that sustains the anthropocene's profiteers, Vap offers an unapologetic case study of encroachment, susceptibility, tenderness, porousness and endurance.

Before the Door of God traces the development of devotional poetry in the English-language tradition from its origins in ancient hymnody to its current twenty-first-century incarnations. The poems in this volume demonstrate not only that devotional poetry--poetry that speaks to the divine--remains in vigorous practice but also that the tradition reaches back to the very origins of poetry in English...To scholars, literary professionals, and general readers who find delight in fine poetry, this anthology offers much to contemplate and discuss. (Publisher).