The Books: New and Selected Poems, by Mary Oliver

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry. Next book on the shelf:

New and Selected Poems, by Mary Oliver

Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward.
— Stephen Dobyns, New York Times Book Review

I don’t know much about Mary Oliver’s personal life, and her poems don’t tell any secrets. At least not about her domestic life, her love life, her work. These are nature poems, for the most part – with titles like “Whelks”, “Alligator Poem”, “Poppies”, “Water Snake”, “The Sunflower”. But they are not merely descriptive. It is hard to describe what it is Mary Oliver does, exactly, with her subjects, but she observes them, and she contemplates them, and she occasionally flies off into transcendent musings about them, and her work is nothing less than miraculous to me. I have ZERO idea who she is, personally, but her outlook is redemptive, and her poems are things I have gone to when things have gotten bad. It takes courage to write like this. It takes courage to set down one’s philosophy so firmly, with such certainty. Her poem about “Whelks” start with an observation about what she sees – “whirlwinds, / each the size of a fist / but always cracked and broken”. Then she launches off into this: “All my life / I have been restless – / I have felt there is something / more wonderful than gloss – / than wholeness – / than staying at home. / I have not been sure what it is.” If I had to compare what she does in these poems to any other writer, I would say Herman Melville, in the “whale sections” of Moby Dick, with their marine-biology-lecture quality, always ending in some high-flown philosophical thought: the whale as metaphor for life, death, mortality. The whale, and all of its different parts, is an opportunity for Melville to philosophize, to contemplate, and also, at times, to pronounce. Consider this paragraph that closes up the section on blubber:

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

But leading up to that, we have heard only practical information: how blubber works, what it is like, what it feels like, what it provides the whale. So that final paragraph comes catapulting out of nowhere and acts like a sucker-punch. The whole book reads like that. You think you’re safe, you think you’re reading a seafaring tale, and then, repeatedly, Melville comes out with something like that.

Mary Oliver is the same. In poem after poem after poem, she takes what she observes in sunflowers, and ponds, and trees, and snakes, and allows herself the time to contemplate her own place in it all, and what these natural objects make her think of. These are profound poems. They are also positive poems, celebratory – even as they admit the pain of life, and the approach of death. Because while we are here, while we still “get” to walk along the beach and look at the shells, or walk in the woods and listen to the birds, it is good to remember that it is good to be alive. We are here, and while we are here, isn’t it amazing? If you’re not a good poet, this kind of stuff can be dreadful, sophomoric, akin to a tween-girl writing a poem about the pretty rainbows. Mary Oliver is a good poet. I start to read one of her new poems, something I have not read before, and I can feel myself hunkering down, gearing up for the sucker-punch, the sudden flight into passion and yearning and philosophy that will come, even though at the beginning she’s just talking about seagulls. So many poets today stay prettily on the surface of things. They may use beautiful language, but the poem never launches. The icicles remain icicles – yes, perhaps they’re described well – but eventually I don’t care about that. What do you FEEL about the icicles? WHY are you writing this poem? WHAT is your point? Don’t be afraid to have a point. Mary Oliver is fearless in having her point.

It’s an incredible experience to read this book as a whole, beginning to end. The poems do have a sameness sometimes. It’s rare that she writes anything personal, or anything indoors-related. You get the sense that she spends her days outside. But the sameness also leads to an impression that this is a woman who is in the game: in the game of life. Everything she sees is an opportunity for either celebration or loss, and everything she sees makes her think of something else … gives her an opportunity to go deep, to perhaps return to her indoor life renewed, or more thoughtful. All of this may make her sound rather New Agey, or precious. She is neither. There is a lot of pain in these poems. She is trying to work it out.

Here is my favorite of her poems. It hit me like a ton of bricks the first time I read it and it still has that effect. My dad loved this poem. It’s one of the poems I’ve read so often that I learned it by heart, merely through repetition.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.