Alleluia to the world

A certain lucent correspondence has served me, all my life, in the ongoing search for my deepest thoughts and feelings. It is the relationship of my own mind to landscape, to the physical world —especially to that part of it with which, over the years, I have (and not casually) become intimate.

Mary Oliver, Little Alleluias

The poet Mary Oliver died in 2019. Little Alleluias (2025) is a posthumous collection of her writings, both poems and essays. In one of these essays she calls her poems "little alleluias," her "way of offering praise to the world."

She writes in a poem called "The Return": From my mouth to God's ear, I swear it; I want only to be a song.

Even her essays often read like poems. Consider this line from an essay called "Flow." "This enormity, this cauldron of having green and blues, is the great palace of the earth." Doesn't that sound like a little alleluia?

Yet she is at her best in her poetry. True, she sometimes stretches for meaning, yet she shines when she lets the meaning come to her. As she writes,

The poem is not the world.

It isn't even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.

It knows that much.

Sometimes she gets personal, as when she recalls her school days:

I went out of the school fast

and through the gardens and to the woods,

and spent all summer forgetting what I'd been taught –

Mostly she writes about the natural world that she explored each day of her life since she was a school girl ... and sings her little alleluias.