Poetry Reviews
There is a temptation, when writing about Mary Oliver, to reach for the word accessible. It is meant as praise, and it is accurate as far as it goes. Oliver's poems are not difficult in the ways that, say, John Ashbery's are difficult. They do not demand that you unpack their syntax or consult a dictionary of arcane references. But accessibility is not the same as simplicity, and it is a mistake to read Oliver as a poet of easy consolation. Her work asks something of us. It asks us to pay attention. It asks us to slow down. It asks us to consider what it might mean to live a life that is not, in the end, about us.
Oliver's most famous poem, "The Summer Day," ends with a question that has become something of a bumper sticker: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" The line is often quoted, sometimes ironically, sometimes sincerely. But the poem is not a motivational poster. It is a record of a day spent watching a grasshopper, of noticing the way it moves its jaws, of following it with the eyes until it flies away. The question at the end is not rhetorical. It is the natural consequence of having spent a morning in the presence of something other than yourself.
This is what Oliver does at her best. She does not tell us to appreciate nature. She shows us what happens when someone actually does. In "Wild Geese," she writes: "You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting." The poem is often read as a message of self-acceptance, and it is that. But it is also a poem about the world continuing to exist regardless of our anxieties. The geese do not care about our guilt. The mountains do not care about our regrets. This is not indifference. It is a kind of freedom.
Oliver's later collections—Thirst, Red Bird, Evidence—were written after the death of her partner, Molly Malone Cook. These poems are often sadder, more explicitly elegiac, but they are not despairing. In "Heavy," Oliver writes about the weight of grief, the way it settles into the body. But she also writes about the heron standing in the shallow water, the way the light falls on the trees. The world does not stop. It keeps offering itself to us, even when we are not ready to receive it.
Reading Oliver slowly—one poem at a time, perhaps one poem a day—is a different experience from reading her in a sitting. The poems need room to breathe. They need us to bring our own attention, our own willingness to be changed. Oliver once said that she wrote for the person who might read her poems while walking in the woods, or sitting by a window, or lying awake at night. She wrote for the person who needed a place to stand. That is what her poems offer: not answers, but a place. A way of being in the world that is open, attentive, and unafraid.
