Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

Devotions is the selection Mary Oliver made of her own poems, published by Penguin Press in 2017.

It gathers more than two hundred poems from across fifty-five years of writing, beginning with her first collection, No Voyage and Other Poems, in 1963, and running through to Felicity in 2015. Oliver assembled and ordered it herself, a couple of years before her death, so the sequence is her judgment rather than an editor's.

The Oliver most readers know is here in quantity: the walks at first light, the ponds and beaches around Provincetown, the geese, the owls, the grasshopper eating sugar out of a hand, the insistence on paying attention as a form of prayer. Read in bulk the work is less soft than its reputation, and considerably more concerned with death.

At 456 pages it is the natural place to start with her, and the natural place to keep returning. It was a New York Times bestseller and remains her most widely read book.