Customer Reviews

Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

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For Pulitzer-Prize and National-Book-Award winning poet, Mary Oliver, the big question the world throws at her every morning is, "Here you are, alive. Would like to make a comment?" This book, she says, is her comment (p. xiv). Given the choice of prose-horse in harness, or the horse of poetry with wings, Oliver says that she would rather fly than plow (p. xiv). However, in this rare collection of essays (punctuated with an occasional poem), Oliver mostly plows.

Oliver's prose here is both memorable and radiant. As in most of her poetry, these essays draw their inspiration from the natural world, which has always offered Oliver the hint of our single and immense divinity--"a million unopened fountains" (p. 19). In her solitude--a "prerequisite to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, [and] flowing water" (p. 22), we find Oliver contemplating the "connection between soul and landscape" in these essays, which explore death, the poetry of unleashed dogs, the town dump, sprawl, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Hawthorne. In one of my all-time favorite Oliver moments, she asks, "What would it be like to live one whole day as a Ruskin sentence, wandering like a creek with little comma bridges" (p. 85)?

In her poetry, Oliver soars. In her prose, she digs deep.

G. Merritt

I will be perpetually grateful to my friend who introduced me to Mary Oliver's work. I was so excited to read she had released another book I could not wait to get my hands on it. The Amazon box arrived and I excitedly tore it open and began to read.

Exquisite. One simple word to describe Mary Oliver's work.

I enjoy her poetry and her books about how to write poetry so I was curious about how this mostly essay book would fare.

I was not disappointed.

A couple of the chapters wobbled very slightly: I was curious about the inclusion of the previously published essays on Emerson and Hawthorne. While they were interesting, they seemed a bit out of place with the other chapters.

I especially appreciated the peek into parts of the author's personal life that I had not been privy to in the past. I loved witnessing more of her life, connecting to the stories and nodding my head as she observed the day unfold about her.

My favorite quote from the book goes like this:

"It is the intimate, never the general, that is teacherly. The idea of love is not love. The idea of the ocean is neither salt nor sand; the face of the seal cannot rise from the idea to stare at you, to astound your heart."

Ahhhh - yes!

The book is short - only 101 pages - and I know I will read it again and again and again and hope Mary Oliver blesses us with another book soon.

Long Life: Essays And Other Writings showcases the prose and poetry of Mary Oliver who has won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for her work. A master wordsmith, Mary Oliver has authored more than twenty books, and in Long Life shows herself adept at the art of the essay as well as a gifted poet whose lyrical commentaries range from describing a goosefish stranded at low tide to being baptized by the mist from a whale's blowhole. Long Life is highly recommended, emotionally resonating, cognitively gifted reading and a welcome addition to personal and academic library literary collections.

Readers of this book come away knowing that Mary Oliver wakes up each morning,
rushes outside and breathes deeply ready to fill her mind and soul with nature's
surprises of the day. There is a chapter, Dog Talk, that will warm any dog
lover's heart, including a wonderful listing of her dogs' names, past and
present. The language is gorgeous and full of imagery yet sparse.

Oliver's comment on the necessity of literature spoke to its essential place
in my life.
"The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute
but to the extravagant and the possible. Answers are no part of it;
rather, it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted
logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys
to his own self-quarrels, his own predicament."

I am a Mary Oliver fan. I love her poetry combining spirit and nature, and I can understand it. I certainly agree that writing should come from the heart; however, if it is to be published, the authors should sometimes provide a map to navigate the terrain. Not Mary Oliver. In these essays and poems, Oliver shares with us how the world calls to her and invites us to greet our world as she does hers. I particularly love:

"People say to me: wouldn't you like to see Yosemite? The Bay of Fundy? The Brooks Range? I smile and answer, 'Oh yes' sometime. And go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world, but to me, the emblem of everything. It is the intimate, never The general, that is teacherly."
Teacherly. My computer says that is not a word. What does my computer know? I like it. Even her prose is poetic. "Every day my early morning walk along the water grants me a second waking. My feet are nimble, now my ears wake, and give thanks for the ocean's song."

I liked Part Three the least. Her praise of Emerson and Hawthorne were first published as introductions to Modern Library Classics. However, she did tickle my curiosity about Emerson. She has given me enough in her short essay to make me want to read his work now that I am an adult. I think of all the rich material which I was fed in school and only now as a mature adult can appreciate and enjoy.

Oliver does not write, here, about aging or the end of life. She writes in both prose and poetry about how full her life is. And she reminds us that full does not necessarily mean busy. She reminds me that I could live a rich and delicious life right here in my neighborhood. She reminds me that I can receive so much by being conscious. This book stays on my shelf with my other Olivers to pick back up occasionally and savor.

by Judith Helburn
for StorycircleBookReviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Like a gentle warning, one we will not heed, Mary Oliver states in her foreword that she prefers writing poetry to prose, but each has its own pleasures and manner of expression - "different paces of heartbeat." Anyone who has dabbled in both types of word-art knows how true this is; and we are grateful that Oliver is willing to adjust her heart rhythm so that our appreciative hearts may beat a little differently, too.

"Long Life: Essays and Other Writings" is a slim collection of prose and those few poems Oliver could not resist interspersing, collected into a love letter from Oliver to the universe, "full of radiant suggestion." Whether walking the beach, ten feet from her home, or the town dump, her praise to the beauty of the world is undaunted and lavish. There is no detail she misses, no praise unwarranted, and Oliver relishes what is life, animate, inanimate, human, canine, reptile or insect. In "Flow," she notes how we already live in paradise, and to be fully aware of it is to "have such music in one's head and body," that one must, brimming with blessing and gratitude, ask: "what is the gift I should bring the world?" For Oliver, cleary, her literary art, adding to our paradise in books.

In various essays, none very long, Oliver writes tributes to favored authors Hawthorne and Emerson, but also to her lifelong partner, Molly, in appreciation of their many differences and habits, making relationships that much richer and more rewarding. She writes of perfect days, and surely all are, in their own way. She writes of childhood huts, little places she built with open doors, so that she might sit inside and watch the wonder of the world around her (I did exactly the same). There is no place where she is unable to find beauty, and whereas Poe claimed to be able to hear the night falling, Oliver listens for the morning as it "settles upward." In her series of poems called "Sand Dabs," she collects pithy and wise sayings, the sort one would scribble on a napkin corner and keep in a wallet so as not to forget. And, even while she strives to appreciate this worldly paradise in open faith, her intellect presses her, "... forgive me, Lord, how I still, sometimes, crave understanding."

Oliver walks in the world to love it. We read her books in order to walk alongside her, love it through her eyes, her words, her spirit "settling upward," and by end of book, bask in the afterglow, recipients of the gift Oliver has given back to the world, to us.

Reading this is like peeking into Mary Oliver's Journal in which she has recorded thoughts about poems and poets, art and artists, and all the secrets and truths they share.

Bought this book for a friend who said it was a good read. Arrived in good condition and before expected. Packaged was excellent. Recommend seller.