Mary Oliver: Swan

[Liam]

I think I have not lived a single hour of my life by calculation.

Something tells me that this little volume will be Mary Oliver's last (I am hoping she will prove me wrong). Having chosen the last few titles with extreme care (the poems in Thirst, for example, focus on the speaker's need and sudden discovery of the Christian faith; Red Bird includes a number of poems about war and carnage, etc), I cannot help but thinking that Oliver has chosen Swan: Poems and Prose Poems to be her conclusive swansong. The jacket blurb says nothing of the sort, of course, as it quotes some of the most beautiful lines from the title poem:

"Joy is not made to be a crumb," writes Mary Oliver, and certainly joy abounds in her new book of poetry and prose poems. Swan, her twentieth volume, shows us that, though we may be "made out of the dust of stars," we are of the world she captures here so vividly: the acorn that hides within it an entire tree; the wings of the swan like the stretching light of the river; the frogs singing in the shallows; the mockingbird dancing in air. Swan is Oliver's tribute to "the mortal way" of desiring and living in the world, to which the poet is renowned for having always been "totally loyal."

Frankly, I have very mixed feelings about Swan. On the one hand, Oliver has never written better, more precise, more lucid, more compact poetry (then again, I said the same thing about Evidence, Red Bird and Thirst). On the other, she insists on politicizing her vision in a number of poems: there is a piece, for example, in which she describes President Obama going down on his knees and offering a prayer to God early in the morning. I was perturbed. The kind of "natural" epiphany that Oliver has really excelled at does not mix well with politics, especially not with mundane and concrete politics, such as she writes about here (a number of poems in Red Bird actually invoke the shadowy concept of an "American Empire").

Some of the later poems, especially the prose ones, seem a bit "lazily" written to me. A small quip about the power of language (specifically, the language of poetry): "Words are too wonderful for words. The vibrant translation of things to ideas. Hello there. My best greetings to you." WTF?

Still, when she shines, she shines. (I refer you to one of the sonnets that I quote below--can somebody help me figure out what the little sparkly thing is?) A Fox in the Dark (probably my favorite!), The Riders, Percy are all excellent, first-rate poems; pure Mary Oliver.

Lord, there are so many fires, so many words, in my heart. It's going to take something I can't even imagine, to put them all out.

[Liam]

A Fox in the Dark

A fox goes by
in the headlights
like an electric shock.

Then he pauses
at the edge of the road
and the heart, if it is still alive,

feels something--
a yearning
for which we have no name

but which we may remember,
years later,
in the darkness,

upon some other empty road.

[Liam]

from Four Sonnets

There appeared a darkly sparkling thing hardly

bigger than a pin, that all afternoon seemed
to want my company. It did me no hurt but wandered
my shirt, my sleeve-cuff, my wrist.
Finally it opened its sheets of chitin and flew away.
Linnaeus probably had given it a name, which I
didn't know. All I could say was: Look
what's come from its home of dirt and dust and duff, its
cinch of instinct. What does music, I wondered, mean to it?
What the distant horizons? Still, no doubt have I
that it has some purpose, as we all have
some purpose which, though none of us
knows what it is, we each go on claiming.
Oh, distant relative, we will never speak to each other
a single kind word. And yet, in this world, it is no small thing to sparkle.

[Liam]

Percy
(2002--2009)

This--I said to Percy when I had left
our bed and gone
out onto the living room couch where
he found me apparently doing nothing--this
is called thinking.
It's something people do,
not being entirely children of the earth,
like a dog or a tree or a flower.

His eyes questioned such an activity.
Well, okay, he said. If you say so. Whatever
it is. Actually

I like kissing better.

And next to me,
tucked down his curly head
and, sweet as a flower, slept.

[Liam]

Something tells me that this little volume will be Mary Oliver's last

And now I have to swallow my own words: it seems Mary Oliver is releasing a new collection of poems in October (A Thousand Mornings), or at least I am hoping that it is a new collection!

[Gregg H.]

And you'll need to swallow your words again this fall. Dog Songs looks like another themed volume, but it will contain some new poems. Looks like we'll be able to read all the Percy poems without hunting through volumes.
Sometime we'll have to have an exchange about Thirst which for me is a book Oliver should have burned in manuscript. Her voice and her whole poetic project goes up in smoke in that volume. Luckily, she got past it.