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. As she writes, 'I could not be a poet without the natural world. 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. 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. (Oct.''In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. The message of her book for its readers is a simple and profound one: open your eyes. When the world of writing enters, currently unfashionable 19th-century writers emerge-Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, William James-in readings that evade academic textual analyses and share the look-at-what-I-saw tone animating Oliver’s observations of the natural world. Her keen observations come as narrative (following a fox) or as manual (building a house) or as poems masquerading as description (“I have seen bluefish arc and sled across the water, an acre of them, leaping and sliding back under the water, then leaping again, toothy, terrible, lashed by hunger”). All manner of aquatic life-shark and mackerel, duck and egret-accompany her days, along with spiders, foxes, even a bear. The natural world pictured here is richly various, though Oliver seems most drawn to waterways. Born of two “blessings-the natural world, and the world of writing: literature,” it partakes of the spirits of a journal, a commonplace book, and a meditation. This group (19 essays, 16 from previous collections) is a distillation of sorts.

Distinguished, honored, prolific, popular, bestselling-adjectives that don’t always hang out together-describe Oliver’s body of work, nearly three dozen volumes of poetry and collections of prose.

Upstream selected essays