New and Selected Poems, Volume One

On the 2026 VCE English and EAL text list. New and Selected Poems, Volume One is a List 1 collection of poetry for Reading and responding to texts. The poems set for study are all the poems in the Dream Work (1986) and American Primitive (1983) sections. 2026 is its second year on the list and it is also on the 2027 list. VCAA's reference edition is Beacon Press (2004). VCAA notes that Penguin's Selected Poems 1965-2005 (2026) contains the same poems in its Dream Work and American Primitive sections, and either edition is suitable; the Penguin edition is the reference edition for 2027. In 2025, 2 per cent of students wrote on it in Section A. VCAA advises that the poem Rage contains references to sexual abuse, and teachers may choose to remove it from study.

The set poems in brief

New and Selected Poems (1992) gathers poems from Mary Oliver's first eight books, plus new poems, with the most recent books first. It won the National Book Award in 1992. Only two of its sections are set: the selections from Dream Work (1986) and from American Primitive (1983), which VCAA's annotation describes as containing some of Oliver's most beloved and celebrated work from the 1980s.

Dream Work (18 poems): Dogfish; Morning Poem; Rage; Wild Geese; Robert Schumann; Starfish; The Journey; A Visitor; Stanley Kunitz; One or Two Things; The Turtle; Sunrise; Two Kinds of Deliverance; Landscape; Acid; The Moths; Poem for the Anniversary; The Sunflowers.

American Primitive (20 poems): August; Mushrooms; Lightning; Egrets; First Snow; Ghosts; Vultures; Rain in Ohio; University Hospital, Boston; Skunk Cabbage; Blossom; White Night; The Fish; Crossing the Swamp; Humpbacks; A Meeting; The Sea; Happiness; Tecumseh; In Blackwater Woods.

These lists follow the published contents of the volume; check them against the contents page of your own copy.

Poems that repay close study:

• Wild Geese. Addressed to a reader weighed down by guilt and despair, the poem releases them from the need to be good and sets their pain against a world that carries on regardless (sun, rain, landscapes, wild geese heading home). The world, it suggests, still offers everyone a place.
• The Journey. A person finally leaves a life of other people's demands, as the voices keep calling out for help, and walks into the night until they recognise a new voice as their own. Saving your own life is presented as both hard and necessary.
• Morning Poem. Each morning the world is made new, and the ponds and lilies are like a prayer answered, whether or not you have ever dared to be happy.
• Dogfish. Watching small sharks feed in the shallows, the speaker reflects on wanting to leave her own past behind, and on the fierce, unapologetic appetite of wild life.
• Rage. Addressed to a father, the poem confronts his abuse of his child and the damage it does. VCAA flags its references to sexual abuse.
• The Turtle. A turtle climbs from the pond to lay her eggs, not separate from the world but part of its pattern, a lesson in instinct and belonging.
• August. The speaker spends a summer day among the blackberry brambles, scratched and happy, her body fully alive in the moment.
• The Fish. The first fish the speaker catches dies and she eats it; it becomes part of her, and she part of the sea, in a cycle of death and life.
• Ghosts. A meditation on the slaughter of the American bison and the destruction of the peoples and ways of life that depended on them.
• Tecumseh. Standing by a river in Ohio, the speaker remembers the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and the removal of his people, and imagines his anger as still alive.
• Happiness. A bear raids a bees' nest for honey, stung and delighted, an image of joy that is physical and unashamed.
• Skunk Cabbage and Mushrooms. Oliver looks closely at the unlovely or dangerous parts of nature (a foul-smelling early spring plant, poisonous fungi) and finds vigour and truth in them.
• University Hospital, Boston. Visits to a seriously ill loved one in hospital are set against the flourishing trees outside, and the uncertainty of illness.
• In Blackwater Woods. Autumn woods turning to fire and ash lead to one of Oliver's best-known statements about living in a mortal world: we must love what will die, hold it as if our own lives depended on it, and release it when the time comes.

Author and context

Mary Oliver (1935 to 2019) was born in Maple Heights, Ohio. She later spoke of a difficult childhood, including sexual abuse, and of the woods as her refuge. For more than forty years she lived with her partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, mostly in Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and the ponds, woods and shoreline there are the landscape of much of her work. American Primitive won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984, and she became one of the most widely read poets in America, as VCAA's annotation notes. She died in 2019.

Context you can use (always linked to a topic):

• The Romantic and American nature tradition. Oliver writes in a line that runs through Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman: attention to nature as a spiritual discipline. She is less interested in nature as scenery than as a teacher.
• Ecology. VCAA's annotation highlights the value of the natural world and our place in the larger ecosystem. Oliver's close attention to creatures, including predators, scavengers and the unlovely, reflects an ecological sense that everything is connected.
• First Peoples and American history. Poems such as Ghosts and Tecumseh look at the violence of colonisation in America, which VCAA's annotation links to respect for First Peoples and the importance of history.
• Private pain. Oliver's accounts of her childhood help explain poems such as Rage and Dogfish, but analyse the poems' speakers and ideas rather than reading them only as biography.

Form, structure and style

• Vignettes. VCAA's annotation describes the poems as little stories: a walk, a swim, a bear in a tree. Each begins in a concrete scene and opens out into reflection.
• Close observation. Precise verbs and sensory detail make creatures and places vivid. The act of looking carefully is itself part of the meaning.
• Direct address. Oliver often speaks to you (Wild Geese, The Journey), which makes the poems feel personal and gives them the force of advice or permission.
• Free verse and lineation. Long sentences run across short lines, so line breaks create pauses, emphasis and surprise.
• Repetition. Repeated words and structures build rhythm and insistence; the 2025 VCAA report reproduced part of a high-scoring response that analysed the repetition in Wild Geese.
• The turn. Many poems pivot near the end from description to a larger statement or question, the moment where observation becomes wisdom.
• Wry humour. VCAA's annotation notes the humour and humanity in the poems; Oliver's delight is often playful.

Ideas, concerns and values, and how they are built

Attention

For Oliver, noticing is a way of living fully and of respecting the world. A 2025 VCAA topic proposed that her poems suggest it is easy to overlook what is important; the report singled out the connotations of the topic's wording as something to unpack.

Nature as refuge and belonging

The natural world consoles (Wild Geese, Morning Poem) and offers a place in a larger order (The Turtle). VCAA's annotation also points to the refuge that nature, dreams and the subconscious can offer.

Celebration of life

August, Happiness and Humpbacks celebrate the body, appetite and joy. A 2025 topic proposed that Oliver's poems are a celebration of life.

Mortality and letting go

In Blackwater Woods, The Fish and University Hospital, Boston treat death as part of the cycle of life and ask how to love what we will lose.

The past and self-rescue

Rage, Dogfish and The Journey confront damage from the past and imagine leaving it, saving the only life one can save.

History and destruction

Ghosts and Tecumseh widen the poems' concern from individual loss to the destruction of peoples and species in American history.

Key poems and why they matter

1. Wild Geese. The collection's best-known offer of consolation: the world goes on and still has room for you.
2. The Journey. Self-rescue as a lonely, necessary act; the voice that is finally one's own.
3. Rage. The collection's darkest poem, which makes Oliver's celebrations more hard-won.
4. August. Pure bodily joy, the clearest case for the celebration reading.
5. Ghosts and Tecumseh. History enters the landscape; nature poetry becomes elegy and accusation.
6. In Blackwater Woods. Mortality accepted, and a guide to loving in a world of loss.

How VCAA frames topics on this text

VCAA's 2024 and 2025 exam reports describe three topic types: a proposition followed by Discuss, Do you agree? or To what extent do you agree?; a quotation from the text followed by a proposition or question; and a direct question. Each text gets two narrow topics about specific ideas and values. For a poetry collection, the exam instructions allow you to write on several poems, or on at least two in close detail.

In 2025, the first year the collection was examined, one topic proposed that Oliver's poems suggest it is easy to overlook what is important; the report used it to illustrate topics that rely on connotation. The other topic paired a quotation from one of her poems with the proposition that her poems are a celebration of life, and the report reproduced part of a high-scoring response on it that analysed Wild Geese and August. Expect topics on attention, nature, joy and celebration, loss and mortality, the self and the past, history, and imagination.

Practice topics (original, not from VCAA)

These are practice topics written for this page in the VCAA style. They are not past exam topics.

1. Oliver's poems suggest that paying attention is a moral act. Discuss.
2. In Oliver's poetry, the natural world offers comfort but not escape. Do you agree?
3. How does Oliver use animals to explore what it means to be human?
4. Oliver's poems are as concerned with loss as they are with joy. To what extent do you agree?
5. Oliver's poetry shows that the past can be survived but not forgotten. Discuss.

Planning example

Topic (practice)

Oliver's poems are as concerned with loss as they are with joy. To what extent do you agree?

Contention

Largely agree: loss and joy are inseparable in Oliver's poems. Her joy is rarely naive; it is reached through, and against, personal pain, mortality and historical destruction, which is what gives it force.

Paragraph 1: joy in the body

August and Happiness. Analyse the sensory detail and the physical images (scratched arms, a stung bear) that make joy immediate, and note that even here there is a cost.

Paragraph 2: loss in the self

Rage, Dogfish and The Journey. Analyse direct address and the imagery of leaving to show personal damage, and self-rescue as the ground of later joy.

Paragraph 3: loss in history

Ghosts and Tecumseh. Analyse how the landscape holds the memory of destroyed peoples and animals, turning celebration of nature into elegy.

Paragraph 4: loss and joy together

Wild Geese and In Blackwater Woods. Analyse the turn at the end of each, where despair and mortality are acknowledged and the world's continuing life is affirmed.

Conclusion

Oliver's celebration of life is persuasive precisely because it does not ignore loss; her poems teach how to love a mortal world.

Common pitfalls

• Writing on poems outside the set sections. Famous Oliver poems such as The Summer Day are in other sections of the book and are not set.
• Paraphrasing instead of analysing. The poems are accessible, so marks come from explaining how line breaks, images, address and turns create meaning.
• Making everything sunny. Oliver's poems include abuse, death, predation and historical violence; ignoring them flattens her ideas.

Read the poems

Oliver's poems are in copyright, so this page analyses them without quoting them. VCAA's reference edition is New and Selected Poems, Volume One (Beacon Press, 2004); Penguin's Selected Poems 1965-2005 (2026) contains the same set poems. Both are available through schools and libraries, and there are many recordings of Oliver reading her work.

Sources

• VCE English and EAL Text List 2026 and Text List 2027, VCAA.
• VCE English 2025 examination and 2025 examination report, VCAA.
• 2024 VCE English examination report, VCAA.
• VCE English and EAL Study Design (version 1.4), VCAA.