Summary

Only two poems from the 2000 book The Leaf and the Cloud are collected in Devotions. Both are more stylistically complex, and less thematically distinct than many of the shorter, later poems collected earlier in the book, indicating a shift in Oliver’s style in the two years between this and the next book, 2002’s What Do We Know?

The next book collected in Devotions, West Wind, was published three years before its successor, and begins with a question which is actually a series of questions in “Have You Ever Tried To Enter The Long Black Branches.” The questions can be synthesized as a search for meaning amidst the mundanities of the modern world, as contrasted with the majesty and mysteries of the trees. This line of thought is picked up again from the opposite angle several...