Mary Oliver spent her last months alive doing something she'd never done before: choosing which of her own poems, out of more than thirty collections and fifty years of writing, deserved to stand as the record. Devotions is that record -- over 200 poems, arranged by Oliver herself shortly before her death in January 2019, running from her 1963 debut through her final book in 2015. It's not a book that argues for her importance; by the time it was published she'd already won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. What this review focuses on instead is what critics and roughly 34,000 Goodreads raters actually said about reading her this way -- as one long, career-spanning arc -- including where that format works against the poems it's trying to honor.
What Devotions Actually Is
This is a selected-poems volume, not a single unified collection, and that distinction matters more here than it usually does. Oliver drew from more than thirty individual books to build it, so the poems inside weren't written to sit next to each other -- they were written years and sometimes decades apart, for entirely separate projects. Devotions imposes a loose chronology on top of that, opening with early work still finding its footing and closing with the sparer, more overtly spiritual poems of her final books. Readers coming in expecting a single sustained collection, the way Oliver originally released her work, should recalibrate: this is a career, compressed into one spine.
At more than four hundred pages, it's also a physically substantial book -- closer to an anthology than the slim, 60-to-80-page volumes Oliver typically published one at a time. That size is part of the point: Penguin Press built it explicitly as a definitive single-volume record, the kind of book meant to sit on a shelf for years and get pulled down repeatedly rather than read once and shelved. The poems aren't grouped by theme or reorganized by subject; they largely follow the order of the original books they came from, so you're tracking Oliver's own development across five decades rather than an editor's curated arrangement by topic.
About Mary Oliver and Why This Collection Exists
Oliver was born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio, into what she later described as a difficult, dysfunctional childhood, and she found an early refuge in the woods near her house and in writing. She attended Ohio State University and Vassar College without completing a degree at either, and as a young woman she worked at the estate of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in upstate New York -- an apprenticeship of sorts to a literary life rather than a formal one. It was there she met photographer Molly Malone Cook, her partner for more than forty years until Cook's death in 2005; the two made their home largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the salt marshes and beaches that show up, directly or obliquely, in poem after poem across this book. Oliver's fourth collection, American Primitive, won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and her New and Selected Poems later won the National Book Award. By the time she assembled Devotions she was ill with lung cancer and would die within about a year of its publication -- which makes the act of selection itself part of what the book is: not an editor's judgment of her career, but her own.
Oliver was famously private about interviews and rarely explained her process in the way some poets do, but she was consistent, across the few interviews she did give over the decades, in describing her daily walks as inseparable from her writing -- she kept notebooks tucked into pockets specifically so she could write down a line the moment it arrived, rather than trying to reconstruct it later from memory. That habit, repeated across fifty years, is arguably the real subject of Devotions more than any single theme: not nature as scenery, but attention as a daily, almost physical discipline. Publishing more than thirty collections and essay books in a single lifetime wasn't incidental to that discipline; it was the visible result of it.
How It Compares to Oliver's Earlier Selected Editions
Oliver had already published a National Book Award-winning selected volume in 1992, New and Selected Poems, Volume One, and a second volume followed years later. Devotions supersedes both by design -- it's the only one she personally curated as a closing statement, and the only one that reaches all the way into her final books, including Felicity from 2015. If you've already read the earlier selected volumes, expect real overlap in the older material, but also the later-career poems on aging, illness, and gratitude that simply didn't exist yet when those first collections were assembled.
What Critics Actually Said
Rather than inventing a verdict, here's what was actually published about it:
“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
“One of our most beloved writers offers both the best of her work and a spiritual road map of sorts.”— The Washington Post
The New York Times Book Review also covered the collection at length on publication, situating it within Oliver's decades-long project of writing directly and unguardedly about the natural world -- a body of work substantial enough by 2017 to warrant a volume this size.
And the aggregate reader picture, for what it's worth:
Where Real Reviews Pushed Back
The most consistent complaint, and it shows up across independent reviews as well as reader reviews, is repetition. Read one poem at a time, Oliver's recurring images -- geese, ponds, herons, the particular quality of morning light -- feel earned and quietly devastating. Stacked 200 poems deep and read straight through, several critics have written, they start to blur into each other; some reviewers went further, calling stretches of the book pretentious or occasionally dated in how it links womanhood to nature and motherhood, a pairing feminist critics have specifically debated as either honoring or narrowing what women's lives are allowed to mean in poetry. Not every reader finished it in one sitting, and multiple reviews explicitly recommend against trying to. That's a legitimate structural weakness of the selected-poems format itself, not a flaw unique to Oliver, but it's real and worth knowing before you commit to 200 poems back to back.
On Grief and What Nature Offered Instead
The earliest poems in Devotions carry loss that Oliver rarely named directly -- reviewers and biographers alike have connected her guardedness about her own difficult childhood to how insistently her early work turns outward, toward herons and ponds and weather, rather than inward toward the family she came from. Critics describe this as Oliver "turning away from grief and finding in nature a vast, incredible gift," and that's a fair read of the collection's opening arc: attention to the natural world functioning less as a subject and more as a place to stand when the alternative was too painful to look at directly.
What keeps that early material from reading as pure escapism, several reviewers have pointed out, is how physical and specific it stays. Oliver rarely reaches for abstraction when a concrete image will do -- a heron's particular way of standing, the exact sound ice makes breaking on a pond -- and that specificity is what separates her nature writing from generic inspirational verse, even when individual lines get lifted out of context and printed on mugs. Read within the fuller arc of Devotions rather than as isolated quotes, those images carry the weight of someone using precise observation as a way of staying present through pain she wasn't ready to name directly.
On Attention as the Book's Real Subject
Oliver's most quoted line isn't technically in this book -- it closes her essay "Upstream," from her 2016 prose collection of the same name, where she writes that "attention is the beginning of devotion." But it's hard not to read that line as the organizing idea behind this volume's title and its selection, too. Poem after poem here isn't really about geese or ponds or grasshoppers; it's about the discipline of noticing them in the first place. That's the throughline critics keep returning to: Oliver treated paying attention as something close to a spiritual practice, available to anyone regardless of belief, and Devotions is best read as 200 different demonstrations of what that practice actually looks like on the page.
On Mortality in the Late Poems
The book's final third, drawn from A Thousand Mornings, Blue Horses, and Felicity, shifts noticeably in tone -- more direct about aging, illness, and the fact of dying, and more explicit about gratitude as a deliberate response to that fact rather than a naive one. Oliver wrote these poems as an older woman who had already survived cancer once and buried her life partner, and reviewers note the plainness that enters her late style: shorter lines, fewer flourishes, more direct address to the reader. Read in sequence after the earlier work, this section reframes the whole collection as something closer to a life's final accounting than a simple best-of.
It's also the section where Oliver's long partnership with Molly Malone Cook surfaces most directly, following Cook's death in 2005. Poems from this period return repeatedly to the specific, unglamorous work of continuing to live in a place built around another person after that person is gone -- feeding the same birds, walking the same beach, noticing the same light change over the same water, now alone. Several reviewers single this stretch out as the emotional center of the whole 200-poem arc, precisely because it applies the same disciplined attention Oliver spent decades turning toward geese and ponds to the far harder subject of grief itself.
Key Takeaways
- This is a selected-poems volume spanning 1963 to 2015, arranged by Oliver herself shortly before her death -- not a single unified collection written to be read start to finish in one sitting
- Multiple independent reviews recommend reading it in small doses rather than straight through, since the recurring nature imagery becomes repetitive at this length
- The book works as a genuine entry point if you've never read Oliver, since it doesn't require familiarity with any of her more than thirty individual collections
- The final third of the book, drawn from her last three collections, shifts into more direct engagement with aging, mortality, and gratitude than the earlier nature-focused work
- Reader debate over the collection's treatment of womanhood and nature is itself a real, documented critical conversation, not a fringe complaint
Who This Book Is Actually For
Readers who want a substantial, dip-in-and-out companion rather than a book to finish in a week -- something to keep on a nightstand and return to one or two poems at a time. It also suits readers who've heard Oliver quoted for years (often without knowing it) and want the actual source material rather than an isolated line pulled onto a mug or a wall print.
Who Should Read Something Else Instead
If you want a tighter, more unified reading experience, start with one of Oliver's original single collections -- American Primitive or New and Selected Poems, Volume One -- rather than this 200-poem retrospective. And if repetitive nature imagery genuinely grates on you rather than settles into a rhythm, the reader pushback above is worth taking seriously before buying a book this size.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- The most complete single-volume overview of Oliver's fifty-year career, curated by Oliver herself rather than an outside editor
- Strong 4.55 out of 5 rating across roughly 34,000 Goodreads ratings
- Positively reviewed in both The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review on publication
- Works equally well as a first introduction to Oliver or a comprehensive collection for existing fans
- The late-career poems on mortality and gratitude add real weight that earlier selected volumes didn't have access to
Cons:
- Reading straight through causes recurring imagery to blur together, according to multiple independent reviews
- Some overlap with Oliver's earlier selected volumes if you've already read New and Selected Poems
- A handful of critics describe stretches as pretentious or dated in how they link womanhood to nature and motherhood
Frequently Asked Questions
What time period does Devotions actually cover?
More than fifty years of work, from Oliver's first book, No Voyage and Other Poems (1963), through her last, Felicity (2015). It contains over 200 poems that Oliver herself selected shortly before her death in January 2019.
What's the actual Goodreads rating?
4.55 out of 5 from roughly 34,000 ratings as of this writing, with the hardcover edition specifically sitting around 4.56 from about 29,400 ratings. Check the live number yourself, since it moves.
Do I need to have read Mary Oliver before starting here?
No. That's the point of a selected-poems volume -- it's built as an entry point as much as a retrospective, and it doesn't assume you've read any of her more than thirty individual collections first.
What's the most common criticism of this collection?
That reading it straight through causes the nature imagery to blur together, since Oliver's recurring images and conversational repetition -- effective in a single slim collection -- become more noticeable stacked 200 poems deep. Several reviewers explicitly recommend dipping in and out rather than reading cover to cover.
Sources & Further Reading
- Goodreads — Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (aggregate rating, reader reviews)
- The Washington Post — "Best new poetry: Mary Oliver, Nikki Giovanni and Maggie Smith"
- The New York Times Book Review — Devotions coverage
- Penguin Random House — publisher page
- Academy of American Poets (poets.org) — Mary Oliver biography
- PositiveLifes.com — free inspirational and life-changing PDF books
Final Verdict
Devotions earns its reputation as the definitive way into Mary Oliver's work, not because it's flawless but because Oliver herself, at the end of her life, judged these to be the poems worth keeping. The repetition critics and readers both flag is real, and it's a fair reason to pace yourself rather than binge it. But taken a few poems at a time -- which is honestly how Oliver's poetry was always meant to be read -- this is as close as a single book gets to fifty years of paying close attention on the page.
Buy Day rating: 8.6/10