I am sure you have heard the excuses usually doled out : no time, taking care of a young one, work, ob-la-di, ob-la-da. It’s been a while, though, since I have read like a maniac. ‘The clock ! That twelve-figured moon skull, that white spider belly ! How serenely the hands move with their filigree pointers, and how steadily !’ My books and my patti’s rasam, that was all I needed. I would ask my mother or brother to carry it as we walked to my grandmother’s place, less than half a kilometre away, for I was going on a ‘vacation’ ! I have spent entire summers this way, two lanes away from home, and yet, on the vacation of a lifetime. The suitcase would be filled with a few pieces of clothing and loads of books. I would also diligently pack a small suitcase every summer, as soon as school let out. I remember disappearing to an attic in my grandmother’s house, a pile of books next to me. I used to once call myself a ‘ voracious’ reader. 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.In books : truth, and daring, passion of all sorts. 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. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” 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. So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered 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. 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.” “In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver. One of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year!
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