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Mary Oliver: The poet and the persona
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Mary Oliver: The poet and the persona
FOR Mary Oliver, important friends from the literary past make their presence known in the humming present tense of forest and ocean. In her latest collection of poems and prose poems, West Wind, Blake and Whitman make cameo appearances in a poem about seven white butterflies. From the more recent past, Elizabeth Bishop and May Swenson, who share with Oliver the knack for precise observation of flora and fauna, are frequently present in spirit. In New and Selected Poems (1992), Oliver pays homage to Swenson in a poem called "The Waterfall," whose "lace legs" and "womanly arms" are a reminder of all that is fluid in nature. The colloquial tone Oliver adopts both toward her literary predecessors and the creatures of the natural world does not detract from her reverence for them. In "Black Oaks," the third poem in the current volume, she even pokes fun at her own tendency to "humanize" what she loves:
Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary, or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance and comfort.
Not one can manage a single sound, though the blue jays carp and whistle all day in the branches, without the push of the wind...
But, she concludes:
I don't want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,
I don't even want to come in out of the rain.
Until 1993, the sexual preference of poet Mary Oliver was a trade secret, albeit not a very well-kept one. If appearance in gay and lesbian anthologies is the main way readers find out such things, Oliver wasn't giving any clues. Winning the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive in 1982 broadened her readership but did not bring this...