Upstream: Selected Essays

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Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Press for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. In her essay collection, Upstream, Mary Oliver sets us on a trail through forest and by shore as she expertly layers in experience and thought from essay to essay.

Upstream: Selected Essays - Mary Oliver - Google Books Upstream: Selected Essays - Mary Oliver - Google Books

This is not fact; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. But you know, an occasional inspired thought and beautiful language isn’t enough to make meaning out of an essay, therefore 1 star. And who knows what it dreamed of in the first springs of its life, escaping the cottontail’s teeth and everything dangerous else. We build and maintain all our own systems, but we don’t charge for access, sell user information, or run ads. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once.The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The literary work of Mary Oliver is represented by the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency/Salky Literary Management, a boutique literary agency that represents significant authors and illustrators. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing-an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness-wonderful as that part of it is.

Upstream | Penguin Random House Higher Education

This was my first Mary Oliver book and I adored her writing style, flowery and beautiful prose that captures the environment perfectly, I am enamored by this and was so glad to read this in spring. Upstream is a tremendously vitalizing read in its totality, grounding and elevating at the same time.And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms was also evident in New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award . I mean all of them, but in particular one tree that leads me into Blackwater, that is as shapely as a flower, that I have often hugged and put my lips to.