wild geese & skunk cabbage, by Mary Oliver

close reading perspectives on the natural world from our favorite Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet

In college, I was swept away by Walt Whitman. I kept Song of Myself near my bedside and read it with an almost spiritual devotion.

I was in the throes of my own spiritual journey, deconstructing the religion I’d been raised in and I found myself so eager to learn about other worldviews and ways of thinking. Whitman’s maximalist universe, filled with sel…