Mary Oliver is a recent discovery for me in the world of poetry (I don't keep close tabs on what's going down in that world, I have to say). The first volume of her work I read was Thirst, which also happened to be her first collection of poems that handle a turning to faith in God. But it's her latest work, Red Bird, that I'm choosing for this list.
Her poetry is an absolute delight to me - it's the sort of poetry you 'get' on first reading and yet it calls you back again and again. First readings generally disclose a luxuriating moment; her use of ordinary language in service of joy and humanity marks her as a genius.
She may write a lot about nature but in a wholly different tone to Ted Hughes. And, latterly, her poetry has used meditation upon all things created as a doorway into time spent in contemplating and addressing the Creator.
I can't do better than quote here the following poem by way of example.
Maker of All Things, Even Healings
All night
under the pines
the fox
moves through the darkness
with a mouthful of teeth
and a reputation for death
which it deserves.
In the spicy
villages of the mice
he is famous,
his nose
in the grass
is like an earthquake,
his feet
on the path
is a message so absolute
that the mouse, hearing it,
makes himself
as small as he can
as he sits silent
or, trembling, goes on
hunting among the grasses
for the ripe seeds.
Maker of All Things,
including appetite,
including stealth,
including the fear that makes
all of us, sometime or other,
flee for the sake
of our small and precious lives,
let me abide in your shadow -
let me hold on
to the edge of your robe
as you determine
what you must let be lost
and what will be saved.
3 comments:
This was one of those strange occurrences where, somehow, we both ended up discovering Mary Oliver. Did we do so independently? I think I found her referenced by Christianity Today Books and Culture and stumbled on her that way.
Not read this book, I have one of her collected volumes. So I approve. Don't know if I would take her to a desert island though - she seems such a solitary individual, that I think it would heighten the loneliness!
As a side issue (and in no way impugning Oliver) why do you think so little modern poetry makes any attempt to rhyme? Is there some firmly established reason for this? Milton gives a long apologia for Paradise Lost on this account, and then fits himself to a strict meter which must have been harder to achieve than rhyme. But most modern poets just seem to go freestyle...
D'you know, I've no idea how I came across her - so I suspect it may well have been you who put me onto her - in which case: thanks!
I guess she is a bit solitary, although she does write about love, too.
I've no idea why rhyming is not in vogue - her poems seem to me to have rhythm from her use of vocabulary and how she spaces her lines and so on, so maybe that makes up for the lack? She's written a book on the topic of poetry - maybe she tells in there?
Which collection do you have, btw?
New and Selected Poems v1
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