Free Downloads Upstream: Selected Essays
“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. 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.” So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved 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 literature. 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. As she writes, “I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” 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. 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.
Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Penguin Press (October 11, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1594206708
ISBN-13: 978-1594206702
Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.6 x 8.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 11 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Best Sellers Rank: #2,483 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #2 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Anthologies #10 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Essays & Correspondence > Essays #24 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology
Upstream: Selected Essays Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (Selected Essays) Swimming Upstream: A Lifesaving Guide to Short Film Distribution Upstream: Oil and Gas Exploration and Production: An Overview Ulysses S. Grant : Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant / Selected Letters, 1839-1865 (Library of America) Selected Shorts: Food Fictions (Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story) Selected Shorts: New American Stories (Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story) Selected Shorts: Baseball (Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story) Selected Shorts: Lots of Laughs! (Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story) (v. XVIII) A Critic Writes: Selected Essays by Reyner Banham (Centennial Books) Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews (Harry Ransom Center Photography) Science, Curriculum, and Liberal Education: Selected Essays Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric: Selected Essays of Robert L. Benson Practicing History: Selected Essays Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century: Selected Essays Montaigne: Selected Essays: with La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (Hackett Classics) American Constitutional Law: Introductory Essays and Selected Cases Robert Adams: Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews
