Married to amazement

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement”, proclaims Mary Oliver (1935–2019) in “When Death Comes”. She was, readers loved her for it, and she surely had more of them than any other American poet who came to prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century. Devotions, first published in the US in the year of her death and recently republished in the UK, brings together a selection, made by the author, from her many slim volumes and other publications – and, although it is a moderately tight selection, it still spans nearly 500 pages. It is not a book of surprises, either for her biggest admirers or for those with a passing acquaintance with her work, but there are a few deeper cuts, such as the three poems published in Three Rivers Poetry Journal in 1980, and it is clear she really did select from everything available.

Slightly unusually, this volume rewinds through her career, beginning with twelve pages from her final collection. This reversal of the usual direction of travel adds little and takes little away, though it does slightly obscure the way Oliver picked up new themes and styles, to the limited extent that she did. (Some later poems are in columns, or in prose; thematically she is consistently a nature-and-god poet, with occasional sorties into the lives of others, often those less fortunate than herself.) There is no critical introduction, despite this being a four- years-posthumous edition. Perhaps this is on the assumption that she needs none, though, as she has so frequently been overlooked in critical discourse – a fate she shares with most poets the general public seems to like – the omission is unfortunate.

Does her work require, or deserve, much critical attention? That is a hard question to answer. It certainly requires no exegesis. Oliver is a poet of quiet reflections, of taking time to stand and stare, of embracing opportunities, however small, and finding worlds in them, in a good old-fashioned earnestly American manner. “It is what I was born for”, she writes in “Mindful”: “to look, to listen, // to lose myself / inside this soft world – / to instruct myself / over and over // in joy, / and acclamation”. Her focus is always on “the ordinary, / the common”. “I do not live happily or comfortably / with the cleverness of our times”, she acknowledges in a poem with a title that will have some readers spitting coffee across page or screen (“With Thanks to the Field Sparrow, Whose Voice Is So Delicate and So Humble”). She’s not lying: her concerns are eternal, not contemporary or political, and her occasional mapless forays into contemporary political matters (“the news is all about bombs and blood”) should make us glad of that. Many poems instead find her lounging “under a tree” or, “on almost any morning / walking along the shore so / light-footed and casual”, tacitly encouraging the reader to do the same.

This happy, willed naivety has obvious pitfalls, and Oliver sometimes blunders into them. How easy it is to write “How poor a gift is freedom to the spirit / That loved the labor”, as she does in the early poem “Jack”, when you don’t seem to have to do much labour yourself. She is usually too self-aware for that sort of thing, though; at times she is even gently self-recriminating. In “Beyond the Snow Belt”, “shouting children” in “moderate” snow “hurry back to play”,

And scarved and smiling citizens once more
Sweep down their easy paths of pride and welcome.
And what else might we do? Let’s be truthful.
Two countries north the storm has taken lives.
Two countries north, to us, is far away […].

And in “Beaver Moon’, about a friend’s suicide, she writes: “You say: / what could I have done? and you go / with the rest, to bury him”. Oliver has a good, if too infrequent, line in social commentary, as in “Music Lessons”, which invites us to read between its lines: “Sometimes, in the middle of the lesson, / we exchanged places”: the piano teacher would take the stool and “the serious husband” would vanish from her mind “as new shapes formed”. Oliver can also be a poet of crystalline, memorable images and turns of phrase: “the suburbs tangled in their lights”; the thumping drum that “bumped our blood”; the woman who works neither slowly nor quickly, “but like a river”; the dog that leaves in snow “a long sentence, expressing / the pleasures of the body”.

Laced through everything, often bluntly, is an unbreakable, often simple and sermonizing, faith: “He made the circles / of the days and the seasons / to close tightly, / and forever – // then open again”, she writes in “Spring at Blackwater”, and either you agree or you don’t, but there isn’t much else you can do. “Accept the miracle”, she advises us drably in “Logos”. More often, as in the well-known poem “The Summer Day”, her faith is fully embodied:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
Which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?

As elsewhere, a reader must swallow a lot of fatty abstractions along with the meat. And this is sloppily overwritten, in a manner that is typical of Oliver’s verse – how might one fall or kneel in any other direction, for instance? There are many moments of banality in this volume, of the kind her detractors find risible, and not without some justification. A not especially slim volume of poems of wide-eyed bucolic whimsy could be selected from it, telling us how nice it is to go blackberrying (“there is / this happy tongue”), or to sit watching birds (“they flutter”), or to be among trees (“they save me, and daily”). Some poems are memorable only for their enthusiastic ridiculousness, such as “The Fish”, in which her pantheism provokes a kind of imagined transubstantiation halfway through dinner: “I am the fish, the fish / glitters in me.” The desire to speak plainly can result in her doing nothing else, as when a run-over snake leaves her “thinking / about death”. Animals frequently behave as Beatrix Potter imagined them, such as the muskrat that sees geese flying back and hurries “to the secret lodges to tell everyone / spring had come” – and presumably then remembers to throw off his mac and mittens before heading out again; or the “happy” wrens in “Wrens” that “whet / their whistles” in a bog and start “singing in the curtains of leaves”.

Yet Mary Oliver’s immense popularity is easy to understand. Her life was not always as easy as it apparently became, but we learn little about that in her poetry. Instead she provides hundreds of bite-sized reflections that are, in the language of our times, widely relatable and inspirational. Her work is also easy to grasp, to the extent that her most widely celebrated and shared poems tend to be those that bite off a little more than all the others, implying that even her least literary readers enjoy her most at her most complexifying. She writes, sometimes fluidly, about widely recognizable, quotidian things. She is a memester’s dream. Above all, as in “Spring”, about remembering a black bear (“Whatever else // my life is / with its poems / and its music / and its glass cities, // it is also this dazzling darkness / coming / down the mountain”), she encourages us to believe, at least for a moment, that however unsatisfying our lives might be, they are inextricably bound with everything else. Most of her poems are provocations to the critic’s cynicism, but if you turn that down a touch you will hear something almost every time you turn the page.

Rory Waterman’s second collection of poems, Sarajevo Roses, was shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte prize. His third is Sweet Nothings. He is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University

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