Dog Songs: Poems

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There are wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. One of her most poignant meditations strokes the heart of why dogs are so much more than the ornament Virginia Woolf’s nephew reduced them to.

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The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is a common, calm refrain: to reach an animal, we must "get rid of fret" (as Lessing remarkably put it.

In her emotionally eloquent poetry collection Dog Songs, Mary Oliver brings the sheer gentleness and genius of her craft all over again. Primarily a poet of nature, she lived for most of her writing career in Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and has been compared to Emerson and Emily Dickinson. Writing of the reciprocal displays of affection between humans and their best friends, Oliver describes: "'Tell me you love me,' he says.Then they would all arrive— Ben, his pals, maybe an unknown dog or two, all of them thirsty and happy. Dog Songs ( public library) collects her most soul-stirring poems and short prose celebrating that special human-canine relationship and what it reveals about the meaning of our own lives — a beautiful manifestation of Oliver’s singular sieve for extracting from the particularities of the poetic subject the philosophical universalities of the human condition to illuminate what it means to live a good life, a full life, a life of purpose and presence. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward. Oliver's capacity for simple ecstasy in response to the natural world remains - Time Out You may also be interested in. Dog Songs includes visits with old friends, like Oliver's most beloved dog Percy, and introduces still others in poems of love and laughter, heartbreak and grief.