One of O The Oprah Magazine's Ten Best Books of the Year! The New York Times bestselling
collection of essays from beloved poet Mary Oliver. "In the beginning I was so young and
such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. 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 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. 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. As she writes "I could not be a poet without the natural world.
Someone else could. But not me. 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. 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.
