Dog Songs

by Mary Oliver

[Kait ✨]

I revisited this collection today for personal reasons, and thought I would jot down a few notes. While Oliver’s collection can feel saccharine and trite at times, I think for any dog lover it will pull at the heartstrings and all (most?) will be forgiven. I don’t think this collection is for everyone, but for those who love dogs, it is a soothing balm. It’s hard to review poetry because to me, it’s often more personal than other genres/forms of literature, and I think Oliver’s own words will help you understand the beauty of [b:Dog Songs|17707772|Dog Songs|Mary Oliver|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1367269165s/17707772.jpg|24757302] better than my own. And so, a few of my favourite lines/passages below:

She roved ahead of me through the fields, yet would come back, or wait for me, or be somewhere. Now she is buried under the pines.

A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them.

And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old—or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.

For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him. . . . Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.