Listing

I plunged--nose pinched tight--through Mary Oliver's new book. She gets on all the ecopoetry lists, but I'd chase all those lists down with an eight foot EraseAll if I could. Maybe the early work is better, but christamightydamn this new book is simply awful. Rod McKuenesque awful. Unless you happen to like lots of adjectives and adverbs. This is before we get to her heinous treatment of nonhuman nature. Because it's not so much that Nature is Other, no, nature's more like an amusing doll that you can slip right over your hand and contol and have talk back to you. But it's all good, y'know, because god created us both. Now apparently, these are poems of mourning for her recently deceased partner of many, many years. The book blurbs expressly mention this. Yet I get no sense of loss in these poems. You want loss and its attendant horrors? Read Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires.

I also have Susan Hutton's On the Vanishing of Large Creatures. Sign up, people. This is some tasty, tasty primo. Great language. The natural world is compelling but elusive. Her mind ranges over culture and faith as well, but not in simple--oh dare I say it?--Mary Oliveresque ways. I'm not quite through, but it's making me happy.

Comments

[Crafty Green Poet]

I haven't read many poems by Mary Oliver. I've liked what I have read but I have thought she is over-rated and yes simplistic.