The world is glorious and holy, and that’s the first reason we should take care of it, not because we need it.—Mary Oliver

On Sunday, Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver shared her poetry at the State Theater in Minneapolis. She’s my favorite contemporary poet. Throughout the reading, I felt tremendous gratitude—both for her precise and beautiful language, and for her reverent, compassionate attention to the natural world.

Oliver is primarily a poet of nature. “I am a God-fearing feeder of birds,” she says in the title poem of her new collection, Red Bird. Not surprisingly, various things with feathers found their way into her reading on Sunday, in poems about herons, finches, loons, egrets, flickers, and wild geese. (I’ve probably missed a few birds. Swans, I think.) But in recent poems she is also turning her attention to human conflict–a poem titled “Iraq,” for example, takes us far from the birds and the Blackwater Woods that she loves.

Activism and poetry are closely linked for Oliver because both have their source in caring about the world, in caring enough to pay attention. Advising a young poet in the audience, she warned against the lures of detachment and academe: “Go out and see what the world is about. Don’t try to have a profession…try to have a calling.”

Mary Oliver is a poet of observation, but also a poet of exhortation. In “The Sun” she challenges the reader to face the sunrise “empty-handed,” if they haven’t already “turned from this world…crazy for power, for things.” In “Lead,” a quietly sad poem about the death of an iridescent loon, she offers to break the willing reader’s heart, that it might “break open and never close again to the rest of the world.” Finally, in “Roses, Late Summer,” she rejects fear and ambition and urges us simply to live:

“If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.”

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