Evidence

by Mary Oliver

Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Mary Oliver offers us poems of arresting beauty that reflect on the power of love and the great gifts of the natural world. Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” she uncovers the evidence presented to us daily by nature, in rivers and stones, willows and field corn, the mockingbird’s “embellishments,” or the last hours of darkness.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Nonfiction, Adult, 21st Century, Literature, Spirituality

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.

Sometimes you need a little burst of joy to break the looming clouds over your life. ‘Everyone should be born into this world happy and loving everything’ writes poet Mary Oliver, ‘but in truth it rarely works that way.’ Luckily we have her work because I’ve always found that reading the tpoetry of Mary Oliver is like microdosing joy. It’s a few quick lines that go down smooth and easy but they nestle into your heart and mind and burn with a warmth that keeps the sorrows at bay. She has an accessibility that never sacrifices depth and such a succinct clarity the words blow through the caverns of your soul to brush out all the cobwebs of anxiety and leave it fresh and shimmering in the sun. I’ve ranted and raved on here many times, but I’m back again because Evidence, Oliver’s 2009 collection, is a touchstone for joy and empowerment that ranks up with the best of her work. As always we have poems reflecting on the redemptive power and beauty of the natural world as well as a sagacious plea to live life to the fullest by embracing the world and all it’s glory while accepting death as just another stage of nature, yet for as many times as Oliver mines these themes she manages to make them always feel like the first breath of fresh air on a crisp spring morning bathed in light. Oliver’s poetry urges you to find your path to a better self and, in the face of her words, one can’t help but want to strive to be one’s best self and ride the waves of life with bravery and a love for living.

Prayer

May I never not be frisky,
May I never not be risqué.

May my ashes, when you have them, friend,
and give them to the ocean,

leap in the froth of the waves,
still loving movement,

still ready, beyond all else,
to dance for the world.

How can you not want to dance to the beat of life along with Oliver with such short, tender poetry such as that? Through her words we understand that ‘truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous / to be understood’ and must accept that we take up only a small space within it all and find comfort it that. We can find the glee in ‘how people come, from delight or the / scars of damage / to the comfort of a poem,’ and how we all, dear reader, can gather around these poems together. ‘I want to be / in partnership / with the universe,’ Oliver writes and shows us that, distilled to its simplest core, it is when we ‘keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.’ When we look to the world and allow ourselves to be swallowed up by its glory. ‘Look at the grass’ she tells us. Really, look at the grass, Oliver wants to know if you’ve ever truly contemplated the grass or if you are willing to ‘behold the morning glory, / the meanest flower, the ragweed, the thistle’ and you think “huh, no I’ve never really thought about the grass” and then you do and wow does it help. Truly. ‘The witchery of living / is my whole conversation / with you, my darlings,’ and what a glorious conversation to have with her and her endless and endlessly lovely advice. Such as the advice she dispenses in To Begin With, the Sweet Grass, because apparently we really need to think about the grass, friends:

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.
It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.

You have this day and that is beautiful enough sometimes. Good job, You, living, breathing, reading this. I’m proud of you. Please know that. And so is Mary Oliver.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

I love the simplicity of an Oliver poem and how it can sooth and enrapture you with ease. I think it’s because she speaks straight from the heart, but maybe not even that, she speaks right from the primal soul that is still wild amidst the natural world. It doesn’t have to be complicated or esoteric to be brilliant. She talks about poet James Wright putting a blank page in a book dedicated to ‘the Horse David Who Ate One of My Poems’ and says she ‘suggest that you sit now // very quietly / in some lovely wild place, and listen / to the silence.’ And that ‘this, too, is a poem’ because we can find poetry even in silence if we let our soul speak in it. Poetry doesn’t have to be hard or a puzzle, it only has to touch our hearts, hold out its hand, and pull us along with it:

I Want to Write So Simply

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize—
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your own heart
had been saying

These poems hit hard. ‘I believe in kindness,’ she writes, ‘also in mischief’ and we find both radiating from every page. And we feel ourselves beautiful, too, in it all. But as always, she reminds us to cherish the natural world, to respect and protect it. Because humans are polluting, refusing to stifle climate crisis, and generally corrupting the beautiful nature for profits. Such as she addresses in the poem Meeting Wolf where:

he has given me
A glimpse into a better but now broken world.
Not his doing, but ours.

A gorgeous collection of poetry that reminds us to slow down, embrace life and live it to the fullest, Evidence is one of my favorite single volumes of Mary Oliver poetry. She continuously hits familiar themes from book to book, but it never gets old and it always is so beautiful. And in this way, you feel beautiful too when reading it. A true dose of joy.

5/5

As for myself,
I just kept walking, thinking:
Once more I am grateful
To be present.

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Years ago I asked a student in an undergraduate poetry class if she liked Mary Oliver's work.

"She the lady who write about bears and otters and her dog?" my asked.

"Her," I said.

"Nah. Don't really like her," she replied.

This is possible? I asked myself. It is possible. How? I wondered.

Don't know.

More recently a friend said of Mary Oliver "you love her or you hate her."

How? I wondered.

I have just read Evidence, and I have an answer.

It's not possible.

Oliver is honest, real, tangible. She is taking you for a walk with her in the woods, along the shore, out back at dusk. Be with her in that natural world where everything is significant and full of grace because it goes about the profoundly mysterious business of being what it is without question. It's a lost art for us in our noisy, cut off, indvidual, and ridiculously complicated worlds.

I can't go near her without quoting her. There is nothing else to say. Take this from "Mysteries, Yes," in her 19th book Evidence:

Let me keep my stance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
And bow their heads.


Life is beautiful. And, as my friend says, Mary Oliver makes it look easy.

[Julie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Oliver published EVIDENCE when she was 73, and even though it isn’t my favorite collection of her work, it is noteworthy, as usual.

Ms. Oliver has a knack, as a poet, that basically makes me want to blow hard raspberries in her face: brevity.

Just look at how quickly she can fill up all of your senses:

A late summer night and the snowy egret
has come again to the shallows in front of my house

as he has for forty years.
Don’t think he is a casual part of my life,

that white stroke in the dark.

BAM! Don’t mess with Mary, y’all. She takes you to church, and quickly.

Speaking of church, there is a shift here, in Ms. Oliver’s work, here in 2009. I wonder if the title represents this?

As a reader, I can’t help but notice that she, who had once been atheistic in all matters of life, is now wrestling with some new possibilities:

Whatever we know or don’t know
leads us to say:
Teacher, what do you mean?
But faith is still there, and silent.

Then he who owns
the incomparable voice
suddenly flows upward

and out of the room
and I follow,
obedient and happy.

Of course I am thinking
the Lord was once young
and will never in fact be old.

And who else could this be, who goes off
down the green path,
carrying his sandals, and singing?

She’s still a skeptic, but I love the evidence that some mental shifts were happening for her in her early 70s. I think it is always a good thing to be unsure of our own “knowledge.”

I leave you with this:

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

[David J · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Keep room in your heart for the unimaginable."

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I imagined the book arriving in the mail Friday, and then reading it on Saturday. Well, when I biked home Thursday by 6:10 p.m. I found 2 boxes from Amazon at my door. I got in, doffed my gear and drank some water. I opened the boxes. The second housed Individuation in Fairy Tales, so excited to read it this weekend. The first held Mary Oliver's Evidence. I walked to the frig. Poured a glass of Chenin Blanc Vionigeir and started reading randomly. I cooked some pasta laced with cheese and herbs, and continued reading. I completed it by 8:50 p.m. I never read any collection so intently, so quickly. She wonders how many summers are left, I wonder how many more collections can she give. Selfish of both of us. It makes me wonder at the wild life in Providence. Are there rivers there? Or do they harken to days in Vermont, Pennsylvania, Virginia or her native Ohio? She meets wolves, mockingbirds, owls, an otter, grieves for Luke and misses Molly, don't we all?

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first experience with Mary Oliver, and it's love love love love love.
I want to devour the pages and thus incorporate her work into the soup of my cells.

[Amey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

~ from the book

Li Po and the Moon

There is the story of the old Chinese poet:
At night in his boat he went drinking and dreaming
And singing

Then drowned as he reached for the moon’s reflection.
Well, probably each of us, at some time, has been
As desperate.

Not the moon, though.

~ from the book

[Mark Robison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this when it came out in 2009 and just reread it. For right here and now, it's my favorite book, period. Nearly every poem here is simply wondrous, from the first four-line poem: "There is the heaven we enter/ through institutional grace/ and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing/ in the lowly puddle." Her writing has a Zen eye for nature and a Christian heart for compassion. She sees the joy and grief in everything and inspires the reader to pay more attention and live more fully. I’ve read 10 or so other Mary Oliver books, and this is the one to start with, in my opinion.

[Jenn M · Rating 5 out of 5]

The problem with poetry is that when you love it you want to read all of it at once and yet at the same time, you want to let each line sink in. Mary Oliver’s work is no different. I already have a second book checked out and will pick up several more. Her simplicity and depth - especially through the eye of the natural world and personal experiences - are beautiful and moving and carry such deep truths worth the time to reflect on.

[Jaslyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary Oliver truly keeping me sane in this time of school sicknesses (Lord preserve me) (I have been unwell twice this year ALREADY) and general bodily fatigue

[kate]

i love u mary oliver <3

[mars · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked Why I Wake Early just a Little more but this poetry collection was gorgeous. Mary Oliver has an incredible use of language.

[Mary Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Oliver’s writing. She always makes me want to spend more time outdoors and to be quiet so I don’t miss anything.

[Lanell Gardiner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just needed some Mary Oliver today :) swans and to begin with, the sweet grass are favorites, as is at the river clarion.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Oliver reminds me of the cards at Hallmark that are labeled "simply stated" - she doesn't apologize for not saying more than needs to be said, meaning some poems are 3 lines at most. Simplicity should not be confused for nothingness, because she is remarkably eloquent.

For instance, "We Shake with Joy":

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.

My favorite of this volume is "To Begin With, the Sweet Grass," a poem in multiple numbered segments. Some little clips:

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful. (2)

...

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure -
your life --
what would do for you? (6)

[Korrie Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book alongside the waters of camano island, the unnatural grassy fields of Arizona, and under the comfort of my bedding with my cats nestled next to me , exactly how Mary Oliver would have wanted it. I will never get over her awe of the beauty of this world, it has touched me in ways words will never be able to describe, in a way only reading it, and now living to see her words in nature can do. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. “What, in the earth world, is there not to be amazed by and to be steadied by and to cherish?” A question I now carry with me always. Thank you Mary, your gift of these poems live on through me ❤️ I do indeed, cherish them ❤️

[Eliana · Rating 3 out of 5]

2025 | Second Read

Somehow the most wretched of days can find respite in burrowing into Mary Oliver poems.

2021 | First Read

“Hope is one thing, / gratitude another / and sufficient / unto itself.” (from “Another Summer Begins”)

[anna renee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t have anything bad to say it but I’m already forgetting it. Sorry Mary

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

„All I can tell you is what I know.
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.
It’s more than bones.I
t’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another,
and maybe    still another.
“

„Prayer

May I never not be frisky
,May I never not be risqué.
May my ashes,
when you have them,
friend,and give them to the ocean,
leap in the froth of the waves,
still loving movement,
still ready, beyond all else,
to dance for the world.“

[Sherry Elmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The pleasure of this collection of Mary Oliver poems was enhanced by the fact that I received the book as a Christmas gift from a beloved friend. And the collection is a pleasure, as Mary Oliver always has been in my experience.

A line from the title poem, Evidence:

I ask you again: if you have not been enchanted by
this adventure--y0ur life--what would do for
you?

[Julio Bonilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

First poetry book I’ve read in awhile. WOW!

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm quite a novice here but even still I can see the appeal.

[Hailee M · Rating 5 out of 5]

god I love this woman

[Lyndsey]

Found my mantra in this Mary Oliver volume:

"I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed."

--From the poem "Evidence"

[Bertha · Rating 4 out of 5]

“what do the creatures know?
what in this world can we be certain about?
how did he know i was nothing”

“we shake with joy, we shake with grief.
what a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.”

“love yourself. then forget it. then, love the world.”


favorites from this book of poems: Deep Summer, Evidence, and To Begin With, Sweet Grass

[che]

said i would read a poem a day and ended up devouring the entire collection within the first two days. not my favorite from mary oliver, but still feels like small prayers.

[Keira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary would be proud - I read this sitting outside listening to the summer song birds and feeling time slip away.

[Kristin Kowalk · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

What, in the earth world,
is there not to be amazed by
and to be steadied by
and to cherish?

Oh, my dear heart,
my own dear heart,
full of hesitations,
questions, choice of directions,

look at the world.

Five stars for page 19 alone.

[Krista · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Mary Oliver. Mortality, pain, beauty, and nature will always get me. Her poems are like a Buddhist dream.