Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Understand from the first this certainty. This passage focuses on respecting what is common to all life, finding the thread or what applies to all forms of consciousness. The minute details of the self and the world that she outlines in these stories communicate her inspiring brand of devotion to life and to always following the stream to its elusive source. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.“Attention is the beginning of devotion” is the last line of Upstream, Mary Oliver’s first essay in a collection of shorts that express her life’s trajectory towards nurturing and developing her creative spirit, always in intimate conversation with herself and with nature.

Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” As she writes, “I could not be a poet without the natural world. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, “a place to enter, and in which to feel,” and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of li terature. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” “In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed.

The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver.

One of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year!

Mary oliver upstream poem