And the great poet shrugs and says that she really has none, and indeed has nothing save for her own curiosity and awe. Midway through the piece, she arrives at an acknowledgement that yes, this is where most such reflections offer up something like a “moral,” the point where we finally see the utilitarian import of what Elvis Costello might call all this useless beauty. Oliver describes the physical motion of these hatchlings as though describing the kinetic poetry of a ballet. She watches keenly as egg sacs hatch and spill open with a flood of new spiderlings. Over the course of several days, Oliver observes the shape and dimensions of the spider’s body, so perfectly defined for the laborious work of web-spinning she notes not only the spider’s dietary habits but also her relational ones. And it’s not a one-time sighting, either, but a relationship that grows and deepens, moving from trepidation into precise, specific knowledge.

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 an essay called “Swoon,” the poet Mary Oliver sees a spider. 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.

Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, who inspired her to vanish into the world of her own 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 to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of 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.” The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet Mary Oliver, also named one of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year, now in audio. Upstream By Mary Oliver AudioBook Summary Narrated by: Hala Alyan, Joy Sullivan, Kate Baer.

Mary oliver upstream poem