An Overabundance of Oliver

If you’re reading Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons as a lunar calendar with me this year, today is another day to read an extra poem, one not matched to a particular moon phase. The poem is Music Lessons. I enjoyed it; the idea of getting carried away in the process of making music certainly speaks to me, although the “knife at the throat” line comes out of way left field.

With these extra poems lately, I feel like we have an overabundance of Mary Oliver. More so, I recently picked up a used copy of another of her books, What Do We Know: Poems And Prose Poems (paid link) (check your local bookstore). I’m glad to have found a copy, because it, not Why I Wake Early has her poem, The Loon, which I really like. It also has a lot of other great poems, although I’ve just scratched the surface so far. I’m still working slowly through Why I Wake Early. I don’t want to take them all at a rush; I need to savor them, make them last, get to know them better. What Do We Know seems to be somewhat seasonally segmented, so I may read it according to each season, somewhat like what I’m doing with Twelve Moons.

All this should make one thing very obvious to readers of this blog: I may have way too much time on my hands! Seriously, that’s one of the aspects of our life that I really appreciate. It’s not at all that I have too much time, I just have enough leisure, and the will, to take things at a more deliberate pace than most people. If I read any of these poetry collections as I would a novel, I would probably still appreciate them, but I may not appreciate them as much as I am taking them far more slowly.

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