Dogs are our closest companions, our most beloved friends. But paradoxically, it is the wildness of the dog, the apartnessof them - the coming free from their leash and the running away - that captures Oliver's heart. But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely and from which we benefit. For the wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we also need all the suitable attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. The dog is one of the messengers of the rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, 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. In addition to this sincere analysis of a moment or prolonged situation of life and thought and routine and habit, so is there a wealth of connectivity expressed between Oliver and one of many of her dogs that have inhabited her heart and life over the years. In “For I Will Consider My Dog Percy” she writes: I love dogs too, and know my aging beagle is not going to be around much longer (we feel like we're counting months instead of years by now.) But do you know those people who entertain themselves by saying out loud what they think their dogs are thinking? That's kind of how these poems feel to me. A little too precious. Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honour as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs? Garner, Dwight. (February 18, 2007.) " Inside the List". New York Times. Retrieved September 7, 2010.

Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs includes thirty-five poems and one essay. Some of the poems are drawn from Oliver’s previous books and others are new to this volume. Among the new poems are the first three which set up the theme of this collection. No Voyage, and Other Poems Dent (New York, NY), expanded edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1965. Booklist, July, 1994, Pat Monaghan, review of A Poetry Handbook, p. 1916; November 15, 1994, Donna Seaman, review of White Pine, p. 574; June 1, 1997, Donna Seaman, review of West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems, p. 1648; June 1, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse, p. 1708; March 15, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of Winter Hours, p. 1279; September 1, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of The Leaf and the Cloud, p. 58; March 15, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Long Life: Essays and Other Writings, p. 1259.Dog Songsincludes visits with old friends, like Oliver’s beloved Percy, and introduces still others in poems of love and laughter, heartbreak and grief. Throughout, the many dogs of Oliver’s life merge as fellow travelers and as guides, uniquely able to open our eyes to the lessons of the moment and the joys of nature and connection. But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. 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.” 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. Tippett, Krista (February 5, 2015). "Mary Oliver — Listening to the World". On Being. Archived from the original on November 11, 2016 . Retrieved September 6, 2020.

Parini, Jay (February 15, 2019). "Mary Oliver obituary". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved February 18, 2019. On a visit to Austerlitz in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty years. [4] In Our World, a book of Cook's photos and journal excerpts Oliver compiled after Cook's death, Oliver writes, "I took one look [at Cook] and fell, hook and tumble." Cook was Oliver's literary agent. They made their home largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook's death in 2005, and where Oliver continued to live [10] until relocating to Florida. [15] Of Provincetown, she recalled, "I too fell in love with the town, that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers.[...] M. and I decided to stay." [4]I must wholeheartedly disagree with every word of this. All the dogs I have loved were city dogs. Their obedience did not make them mere possessions or ornaments. Their leashes did not make them less noble or less able to make me kinder or sweeter. Their leashes kept them safe in a city that is inhospitable to unleashed dogs. Their leashes enabled them to live and thrive in an urban environment. The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind” (119). a b " "Poetry: Past winners & finalists by category". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved April 8, 2012.

It is easy to become distant from the personhood of nature. Our society encourages it in every way possible. The exception is our pets, on whom we lavish special attention, meanwhile participating in the systematic destruction of the nature and the world’s last wild places.

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In ‘School’, Mary’s recitation on the impermanence of love and loss is as profound as it is simple: Maxine Kumin describes Mary Oliver in the Women's Review of Books as an "indefatigable guide to the natural world, particularly to its lesser-known aspects." [12] Reviewing Dream Work for The Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America's finest poets: "visionary as Emerson [... she is] among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey." [1] New York Times reviewer Bruce Bennetin stated that the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection American Primitive, "insists on the primacy of the physical" [1] while Holly Prado of Los Angeles Times Book Review noted that it "touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity." [1] Some things are unchangeably wild, others are stolidly tame. The tiger is wild, and the coyote, and the owl. I am tame, you are tame. There are wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change. But the dog lives in both worlds. (c) Lawder, Melanie (November 14, 2012). "Poet Mary Oliver receives honorary degree". The Marquette Tribune. Archived from the original on March 5, 2013 . Retrieved December 6, 2012. Here is Mary Oliver reading “Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night,” one of my favourite poems in the entire book: https://vimeo.com/76060890

Ratiner, Steve (December 9, 1992). "Poet Mary Oliver: a Solitary Walk". Christian Science Monitor . Retrieved March 6, 2018. It would be a mistake to think that the words we write are any more meaningful than the “large, exuberant letters” Bear wrote in the snow. In fact, some might argue they are less so. For when we write, we so often do so to express abstract concepts, interpretations of reality, opinions, and ideas. A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing. Mostly, it is about a dog. It is also about choices. About what we value, as a society and as individuals. And about education. And materialism. About wildness, about love.New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1983, pp. 10, 22; November 25, 1990, p. 24; December 13, 1992, p. 12.