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In lines pulled taut by the tension between the silent beauty of nature and the poet's longing for words, Mary Oliver has again provided readers with plenty to think about. Consider "Stars": "How can I hope to be friends / with the hard white stars / whose flaring and hissing are not speech / but a pure radiance? / How can I hope to be friends / with the yawning spaces between them / where nothing, ever, is spoken?" Yet Oliver does strike up a kind of friendship between nature's inexpressible beauty and the necessity and solace of language. She writes vividly of each, noting the way "the sunlight and shadows are chasing each other," (from "The Dog Has Run Off Again"), in one instance, while elsewhere describing the excitement of writing poems: "little curls little shafts / of letters words / little flames leaping" (from "Forty Years"). Oliver is one of the most honored poets now writing in the English language, and, along with Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and A.R. Ammons, an important part of the revival we are seeing in contemporary pastoral poetry.
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What news does Oliver bring from her beloved woods and seashore? What bright bits of wisdom has she woven into the airy but sturdy basketry of her poems? In an ardent opting for freedom, Oliver says simply, "I don't want to sell my life for money," and yet there is nothing simple about it, or in her declaring that sometimes she just doesn't want to come in from the rain or put a stop to her dog's happy romp through wet leaves. At 60, Oliver is amazed that she feels so much as she did 40 years ago, long before she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, long before her need to preserve, in the mobile shrine of words, the beauty she observes in nature brought her "pomp" and recognition. Oliver has always written to express gratitude, but, for all her meditativeness, what engages her most is not placidity but passion: wind-twisted trees, birds of prey, river rapids, darkness, and love. And as Oliver intends, her poems do indeed make us "shiver with praise."
Donna Seaman
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