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In her collection of essays, Blue Pastures, Mary Oliver writes about her debt
to Walt Whitman. "But first and foremost I learned from Whitman that the poem is a
temple - or a green field - a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary
way is it an intellectual thing - an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust
wordiness - wonderful as that part is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist,
but to speak - to be company." When I read my poems in public, I usually include others'
work, many times a piece by Mary Oliver because of this quality. Her work provides
"a place to enter, and in which to feel."
Her poetry is a place teeming with life, and this latest collection is no exception -owls
and butterflies, pilot snakes and foxes, sand dabs and maple trees, poetry and love, death
and the blue ocean. Even the phrasing is charged with energy, with life-force: roses in the
wind have "honeyed seizures"; the fox is admired noting "the flounce of his teeth"; even
abstractions move in bodies like ambition who says Listen...why don't you get going?
"nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another."
When I read a single Mary Oliver poem aloud, listeners readers sense a part of their self
waking up, feeling. This is particularly true when reading a whole collection. Robyn
Selman put it this way when reviewing New and Selected Poems
"one can't help noticing
the day when one reads Mary Oliver..." We begin by sensing what is on the page but often,
having been tuned by her words, we feel in the place of our own lives. Such a transfer
is rare in today's poetry.
Her work has been called "sentimental," "romantic," but also "impersonal," and "visionary."
By her own admission, her puts her allegiance with Whitman and the power of poetry to
deal emotionally with life. Tolstoy said that "art argues in a way that the rational
mind does not comprehend," said this is the "method" of Mary Oliver's poems. Because
they approach through feeling - and because of the growing fashion of more syntactically
complex poems - her poems stand accused of "sentimentality." And yet, at poetry reading
after reading, her direct, evocative poems involve listeners in wonderful and rewarding
ways. Then, in the recursive deepening of private reading, that first motion felt at a
fresh listening is rewarded with philosophical musings on the most weighty spiritual
issues, death, reverence and wonder, and the purpose of being alive in the world.
She said in an interview that the poems from Twelve Moons through
House of Light form "a unit," and so the New and Selected Poems gathers
them all up, like an autumn harvest bundle. Then came the insightful Poetry
Handbook and essays in Blue Pastures. While the poems in the previous
volume, White Pine, include prose poems and other formal innovations, the
overall structure of the four seasons feels repetitious of
Twelve Moons.
West Wind, on the other hand, is Mary Oliver at her finest. The dazzling
language and attention to detail in nature and in language, I've come to expect in her
work is here, as is the apparent leisure of the speaker which makes entering her poems
seem so easy. The precision of line, image, and rhythm continue and are enhanced by the
innovations from White Pine. It all comes together now without seams or
hesitation.
The themes begin with death, the attentive angel in nature, the one we fear and hide from
most. But in the temple of these poems, it is death who hauls everything out of "mere
incidence into / the lush of meaning" (At Round Pond). That phrase, "the lush of meaning"
! I still marvel at such lively language. Against the insistent force of death, the daily
events take on a clarity, revealing what is simply galloping in our gerbil-wheel and what
is really living. It requires we make a choice. "Today is a day like any other:
twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain," she writes in "Blacks Oaks."
If we choose the money-making or status-grabbing or security-grubbing, facing our
own death will show our hollowness, and the utter brilliance of being alive. "To
set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome with amazement!" puts it all
in perspective ("Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches").
One prose poem late in the book, about a cricket that comes indoors for "the most prized
gift of the gods: warmth," creates a type for each of us. It highlights the other choice
when confronting mortality. With warmth and food enough, the cricket "got used to hope,"
as we all do, ignoring the limits to life. "It thought: how sufficient are these empty
rooms!...and drew a little music from its dark thighs. As though the twilight underneath
the refrigerator were the world. As though the winter would never come."
This comes from Part Two of West Wind , the thirteen-section title poem,
which a mixture
of prose and verse poems that are one of her most successful series. Oliver moves in and
out of her usual themes smoothly but with the added layer of a love-relationship. In the
clarifying light a close friendship with death brings, the small gestures and daily wonders
draw our attention, evoke our gratitude, and help shape our priorities. This idea moves
under and through the series so that the final lines of the last section ring with
certainty, not sentimentality: "I am thinking of you. / I am always thinking of you."
Readers of Mary Oliver will find in this collection the culmination of a poet deeply
devoted to her craft. Her voice is sure and inviting, a guide through this temple of poems.
She leads us through them and the world in them, to the back-gate in the longer final poem,
"Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches." There she offers us, again, our
own lives when she writes: "Well, there is time left-/ fields everywhere invite you into
them."
© Edward A. Dougherty
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