Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

Reading Mary Oliver is sort of like feeling your heart pounding in your throat, threatening to break at any moment. I feel sadness at the very beauty of her words, and then I feel mad because I can’t replicate that same beauty with my own.

I am trying very hard to be a writer. I have two book projects that I am working on. One is a nonfiction book about a subject I am very passionate about, the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, specifically those where she appeared to children.

The other project is a novel set in my home state of Louisiana. It is my first attempt at writing a novel, but it is a novel that I started in June of 2013. Since then, the beginning of this novel has had many iterations. The setting has changed, the main character has changed, the intended audience has changed. After a writing class with Louise Miller in fall/winter of 2023 I had a more clear vision of my work, and guided by Louise’s excellent writing exercises I made a serious start (again?) of my book. Life then proceeded to get in the way and my work lay dormant until recently. After a few weeks of serious writing, I now have about 13,000 words with a clear outline and the first three chapters mostly done. But, I don’t think it’s really any good, and that frustrates me.

And, then, I read an ARC of a soon-to-be published book of the works of Mary Oliver, a compilation of prose and poetry called Little Alleluias (Grand Central Publishing, August of 2025). And, then, I’m sad and I’m mad.

It is titled Little Alleluias because Oliver herself called her poems, Little Alleluias, “not meant to define but to praise, to rejoice in the maker and what has been made.”

Mary Oliver died in January of 2019 at the age of 83. An article on NPR’s website says that she won many awards for her poems, among them the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award. Even people who don’t regularly read or enjoy poetry may have heard the closing lines of one of her poems, “The Summer Day”

Tell me, what is it you

plan to do

with your one wild and

precious life?

Another of her more famous poems was written at a difficult time in her life, diagnosis and successful treatment for lung cancer. “When Death Comes” ends with her needless worry:

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and

real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this

world.

She did indeed make of her life something particular, and real. She left behind a body of work that perfectly blends introspective wandering with nature in all its beauty and glory.

In Little Alleluias, described as a trinity of works by writer and poet Natalie Diaz in the forward to the book, Oliver combines prose with poetry.

Section I is titled “The Leaf and the Cloud,” and in it we get a glimpse in the daily practice Oliver enjoyed for the many years she lived in Provincetown, rising early, making coffee, watching the sunrise, and then a long walk through the woods and near the water.

It is also where one of her poems is found that made me cry on this damp, rainy day in May. Titled “Her Grave, Again,” this poem recalls Oliver’s love for her dog, who Oliver says, “

For now she is God’s dog (the deep electric kindness of her eyes.)

I’ve only owned one dog in my life, my dear beloved Puccini, and I read this poem of Oliver’s with him in my mind, my lovely little white dog, just like Oliver’s little white dog Bear, gone from me now, but hopefully, also God’s dog now.

Section II is titled “What Do We Know?”

Mary Oliver lived a quiet life, which had to be filled with books and art and music. She had no college degrees on her resume, but she freely quotes Emerson, St. Augustine, Rumi, and more.

She writes of nature and God’s creatures of sea, sky, and earth as though she owns them all, as though she knows them all. Many get their own poems, “Snow Buntings,” “Tree Sparrows,” “The Loon,” and “Mink.” There are poems about snakes and terns and snails and all manner of things one finds on a walk through the woods. She writes of finding a spider in her key-lock, and rescues it to sit on her windowsill, on a leaf, where she monitors it daily until one day it has spun some strands of a web and disappeared.

Section III is titled “Long Life: Essays and Other Writings,” and it is here that we experience Oliver’s lesser known prose, for she herself states that she would rather write poems than prose. These essays are also filled with her thoughts on nature and the wildlife that surrounds her. She writes of Wordsworth, Poe, Hawthorne, Shelley, Mahler, St. Francis. She has the works and words of all of these great minds in her possession, where she can call upon them at her will.

In one subsection called “Sand Dabs, Seven,” Oliver writes:

There is no pencil in the world that doesn’t have the ability to strike out as well as to instigate. It’s best to write, to begin with, generously. … Some writing should be set aside and forgotten. Maybe it needed more salt and pepper. Or, maybe, less. … Too many words, even the right words, can kill the poem.

A beautiful metaphor for many things, perhaps how we live our lives, to grab at many things and let go of those we don’t need, but to have enough to choose what we do need. But, I also think it could be a metaphor for the tongue itself, which has the ability to strike out with bitterness, or to soothe with kindness.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for this beautiful work of literature, and to Mary Oliver for the inspiration to hopefully someday figure out “… How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?”