Nicola Waldron Reviews Oliver's Upstream

Mary Oliver's books are quintessential resources for teachers and students diving into the craft of poetry. A new selection of Oliver's essays reinforces Oliver's position, as Nicola Waldron asserts in her review of Oliver's selected essays, Upstream. "Her prose glides, measured rather than cautious, so that we enjoy the ascending and descending rows of the author’s thought that return to us and extend out again, ending in suitably poetic finale." From there: 

And while it is Oliver’s expertise in poetry that allows her to arrange her observations into highly satisfying patterns of argument, the essay form allows for contemplative wandering that takes her, and consequently her reader, on a more leisurely kind of journey. We can wander inside her poems, for sure, but her essays allow us to ramble.

The works gathered here, from 1995’s Blue Pastures through 2013’s Dog Songs, confirm Oliver as no mere occasional essayist or prose “interludist,” but a master of the form. A skilled exegetist, she reviews nature and literature both, “the gates through which [she] vanished” from the “difficult place” of her childhood. Just as she anatomizes and explains the natural world, so she articulates with exactitude the inner-outer dramas that informed Emerson’s, Whitman’s, and Poe’s voices (how surprised I was to see this last, so relentlessly dark, in these pages). Though women have clearly been important influences (Oliver met her longtime partner, the accomplished photographer Molly Malone Cook while helping organize Edna St. Vincent Millay’s papers), she acknowledges few of them in this book, no mention here of Dickinson or Alcott — and I, of a generation that, quite rightly, insists on inclusion, missed them. However there’s a characteristic sincerity in her focus on necessarily male influences (she was born in 1935): if she responded above all to Whitman and Emerson, so be it. Oliver is a woman who has chosen to live through her own creative impulses, her own best model.

Read more at Los Angeles Review of Books.