by Kelly Pickerill

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets.  Her poetry seems simple at first read–using unadorned language she paints pictures of the natural world without much pomp or frivolity–but her poems have a way of getting under the skin, leaving the reader with a feeling of reconnection to a world that, in this age of SUVs, TVs, day planners, and Wall Street, can begin to look like another planet if we’re not careful.

Influenced by Whitman and Thoreau, Mary Oliver’s world is peopled with forests and herons, dogs and wetlands.  Her poetry speaks to the part of us that craves communion with nature and a deeper understanding of our human selves.

One of my favorite poems, from Why I Wake Early:

“Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?”

Don’t call this world adorable, or useful, that’s not it.
It’s frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds.
The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil.
The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold.

But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white
feet of the trees
whose mouths open.
Doesn’t the wind, turning in circles, invent the dance?
Haven’t the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe,
until at last, now, they shine
in your own yard?

Don’t call this world an explanation, or even an education.

When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking
outward, to the mountains so solidly there
in a white-capped ring, or was he looking

to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea
that was also there,
beautiful as a thumb
curved and touching the finger, tenderly,
little love-ring,

as he whirled,
oh jug of breath,
in the garden of dust?

Oliver’s newest collection, Evidence, begins with a short poem, “Yellow,” that simply yet profoundly contrasts human convention with the natural order of things:

There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.

Share