From there we go into Franz Marc's tragic end, come too soon. There is such an ineffable sadness to Oliver's unwillingness to share this news with the horses, as if they exist in a different realm where such tragedy could not occur, would be outlandish. It shows us Oliver's belief that nature itself isn't violent in the way that humans are. While death occurs there, nothing as ' impossible' as Marc's young death would be feasible. Yet despite his early death Marc clearly brought some joy to the world, some beauty, something for which Oliver is grateful. Among the paintings he produced in those two ecstatically prolific years just before he was drafted was The Fate of the Animals— an arresting depiction of the interplay of beauty and brutality, terror and tenderness, in the chaos of life. An inscription appeared under the canvas in Marc’s hand: “And all being is flaming agony.”

The 39 poems in Blue Horses are much like prayers, I think. They don’t strive to answer questions, but turn things over like seasons in the hand. Some favorites (this week) are “Blueberries,” “Such Silence,” “Watering the Stones,” “Drifting,” “On Not Watering The Lawn,” “Do Stones Feel?,” “What Gorgeous Thing,” and “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac.” Mary Oliver, born in 1935, never ceases to amaze me. Many of her poems reflect on nature, but she is always having new experiences and learning more about herself. Some of these poems give an insight to a new home, and a new love, even now so late in life. I would recommend her outlook to anyone needing a bit of a boost, anyone who feels lonely, or anyone who has had to forge their own path.With each of her volumes in the past five years, Mary Oliver has grown more personal and transparent, which has benefited her work. Her recent poems are less concerned with her critics and more concerned with celebrating the diverse sensual and spiritual pleasures life can offer. Blue Horses is a sweet, friendly collection and the kind of book that will continue to endear Oliver to readers.

Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” wrote Mary Oliver in one of the masterpiece from her suite of poems celebrating the urgency of aliveness, Blue Horses ( public library). I don't think I realized that Mary Oliver had come out with another volume of poetry, but she's one of my favorites, and when I saw it at the public library I snagged it right away.We go to poetry for countless reasons, which helps explain why Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, Helen Vendler’s Soul Says, Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter?, and Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry are still necessary. No one should go to Mary Oliver’s poems to be challenged, and that’s all right. There’s nothing criminal about being soothed by an often tenderly crafted Oliver composition. She won a Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive, her fourth volume of poetry, and Blue Horses is her twelfth. Like so much of her work, it is an uncommonly direct yet beguiling love letter to vitality itself, poured from the soul of someone utterly besotted with this world which we too are invited to embrace. Continuing an artistic renaissance that began with A Thousand Mornings (2012), Mary Oliver’s latest poetry collection, Blue Horses, finds her exploring a new home and rediscovering love. Oliver has long been America’s bestselling poet, and these latest conversational poems show why you can find her work on shelves across the United States. If there is a statement of purpose for Blue Horses, it arrives early in the book with “I Don’t Want to be Demure or Respectable,” in which the poet writes:

Animals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that was good in me. The Little Monkey, 1912. (Available as a print.) The Large Blue Horses, 1911. (Available as a print.) Oliver also uses her this book to survey a wide spectrum of spirituality and art, including eastern sensual poetry (“Rumi”), the writings of Lucretius (“After Reading Lucretius, I Go to the Pond”), zodiac signs (which she uses as a jumping-off point to explore her battle with cancer in “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac”), and Hinduism (“To Shiva,” another sharply observed poem about mortality). “First Yoga Lesson” is the best poem of this ilk because it shows the poet confronting her spiritual interests and aging body with humor: This is one of Marc's earliest major works depicting animals and is one of the most important of his series of portraits of horses. It is often thought that Marc considered animals to be more pure and more beautiful than humans and, therefore, his paintings represent a pantheistic understanding of the divine or of spirituality. [6] Within a month of painting them, Marc was dead — a shell explosion in the first days of the war’s longest battle sent a metal splinter into his skull, killing him instantly while a German government official was compiling a list of prominent artists to be recalled from military service as national treasures, with Marc’s name on it. The Fate of the Animals, 1913.

is the piece of God that is inside each of us.'This is stunning and I think a key theme in Oliver's poetry. She believes wholeheartedly in the good and the beautiful, in beauty for beauty's sake, despite the cruelty and the malice we are also capable of. And this comes from a little piece of the divine in us, of something outside ourselves that is good. Being Christian myself, I do like this idea, but I can also imagine that for non-religious readers that perhaps doesn't strike entirely true. I love how the first two lines are almost like a frame-narrative, a gateway into the poem where you have to accept that as the viewer you can step into a painting and engage with it, relate to it, learn from it. Without that belief, the rest of the poem feels less accessible. The horses are the ones to approach Oliver and I think it's key that she says she is 'commingling' with them. She becomes one with the horses, in a sense blends her awareness with theirs. The horses are not "straight-forward" horses, but rather almost like messengers, clearly grand and knowledgeable, but with a fondness and acceptance of our poet. Any previous exposure I've had to Oliver's poems has been via the internet and I've loved them all, though the first one I came across online remains my favorite of hers: The painting was the inspiration behind the title of a bestselling volume of poetry, Blue Horses (2014), by the American poet Mary Oliver.