Natural Poet

...The problem isn’t stinginess of spirit—poets from Chaucer onward have gotten enormous mileage out of hate—but, rather, banality...

...One poem, “Of the Empire,” stands out for its sheer loathing for a public that doesn’t always share her political views: they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness...

...And while she’s won nearly every major award available to American poets, she’s probably more popular on the high school level than in college, and more popular still with the small but active poetry-reading public...

...Oliver speaks plainly, carefully, and beautifully for those who place protection of the Earth above all other interests...

...Even those who disagree with her strong views should read it...

...A cycle of 11 linked love poems—quite possibly a eulogy for her recently deceased life partner and literary agent, Molly Cook—overfl ows with genuine emotion and love but falls fl at in its poetic efforts to condense and channel that emotion, sometimes resorting to crude sexualized metaphor and occasional dead moments...

...She’s almost never obscure but, unlike Ted Kooser—long the unoffi cial laureate of the environmental movement—her poetry rewards multiple, careful rereadings...

...Whether she’s imagining Percy’s emotional advice, or hoping that he could somehow convince the secretary of defense to end the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, she’s funny and interesting if unapologetically slight...

...God, although not absent, remains a formal, distant deity while the natural world and the world itself, along with the “ghosts of Emerson and Whitman” (Oliver’s leading intellectual forbears), seem far more important than any heavenly spirit...

...Likewise, the juxtaposition of the birds and earth forces in that second example brings home the undeniable interconnectedness of nature...

...Even in the context of the poetic cycle, the thought she expresses never really gets fi nished...

...But her poetry is rigorous, beautiful, well written, and offers genuine insights into the natural world...

...BY ELI LEHRER In a land where few poets can make more than a pittance off their verse, Mary Oliver stands as a commercially successful outlier...

...And when Oliver takes on politics in a serious way, her verse becomes decidedly mediocre...

...She’s clearly earned her place as a poet laureate for romantic environmentalists...

...True, she shows a modicum of real talent in comic verse about her dog Percy...

...The image of Red Bird — which pervades the collection — may sum up her view of the world better than anything...

...This, more than anything else, outlines the essentials of Oliver’s philosophy...

...The surprising, active verb formulation “expressed itself”—all the more arresting on the page because it’s separated from the rest of the poem with a blank line—expresses the wondrous nature of a squirmy bug’s transformation into a thing of great beauty...

...This newest collection overfl ows with a true, honest respect for all of nature...

...Luckily, Oliver or her editors seem aware of these limitations: The political poems are buried in the middle of Red Bird, and the stronger environmental works open and close it with vigor and force...

...As with most artists, Mary Oliver’s talent has its limits...

...But to ignore Oliver on this basis would be to deny the beauty of the psalms to those outside the JudeoChristian tradition, or the power of the Bhagavad Gita to non-Hindus...

...In the fi nal poem, the “Red Bird Explains Himself,” the bird speaks for itself in profound terms: If I was the song that entered your heart then I was the music of your heart, that you wanted and needed, and thus wilderness bloomed there, with all its followers: gardeners, lovers, people who weep for the death of rivers...

...Whether she’s describing a caterpillar’s transformation (it expressed itself into the most beautiful thing) or describing her own mystical connection to birdsong (I listen hard / to the exuberances of / the mockingbird and the owl, / the waves and wind)—she almost always can come up with striking, resonant images...

...She’s a perceptive, rigorous muse of a modern environmental religion...

...Oliver observes with a great sensitivity, and puts her impressions in verse in a way that few can match...

...Oliver wants readers to snap into lockstep agreement with her sweeping statements rather than providing an emotional reason for doing so...

...One poem, “So Every Day,” reads in full: So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you...

...And this was my true task, to be the music of the body...

...Above all, Oliver’s poetry mixes two kinds of spirituality: interest in a creator god, and an almost rapturous love for creation...

...Indeed, for the past seven years, she’s supported herself entirely through writing...

...In other words, Oliver exalts a romantic—that is, emotional above all else—sense of the natural world combined with a transcendental love for the environment...

...Eli Lehrer is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute...

...It’s well worded—“beautiful crying forth” has a nice ring—but “So Every Day” presents little more than a passing thought that relies more on the reader than the poet to provide emotion...

...And when she sticks to that topic, she ranks among the fi nest poets the English language has ever produced...

...Some other parts of Red Bird don’t work as well...

...Her odd juxtapositions of observations about lilies and ravens work just as well as her recounting of things she saw while walking...

...In all, she has written almost 20 books and, although she’s produced a textbook and innumerable essays, her output has remained largely metrical...

...Beyond her observations of the natural world, however, Oliver’s craft fades...

...While she does well describing nature, her efforts at political poetry show a tin ear and obtuse sensibility totally out of tune with the wonderfully sensitive muse behind her other work...

...Most of the poems in this latest collection concern her own impressions of the natural world...

...For those not given to romantic reverence about the natural world, some of her ideas and concepts may seem foreign...

...Although it will never show up in supermarket checkout lines, her work always tops the modern poetry bestseller lists at Amazon.com and in the trade journal Book Sense...

...She has an obvious, well-deserved appeal: At her best, Mary Oliver writes genuinely good, truly accessible poetry...

...And while Oliver has spent a good part of her adult life on college campuses, she never held a traditional tenure track position or earned a college degree...