The Darker Visions of Elizabeth Bishop and Mary Oliver

Liza Wieland finds light in the darkness when reading the "suffering poems" of Elizabeth Bishop and Mary Oliver. At Lit Hub, Wieland explains that "Oliver and Bishop share a clear appetite for animal flail and gore and death. But many readers don’t seem to make very much of this." More:

...Critics praise the work, but tend to smile gently, indulgently, upon Bishop’s rhymes, her received forms and elegant impersonality, Oliver’s “old-fashioned” subjects. 

Looking deeper, I find something else, a darker vision. Both Bishop and Oliver escaped from unhappy home lives: neglectful mothers, sexual abuse by an uncle, a father. “It was a very dark and broken house that I came from,” Oliver once told an interviewer. Bishop couldn’t or wouldn’t say anywhere near that much, even surrounded by all those confessing poets. She called them “the self-pitiers.”

There was no #MeToo for Elizabeth Bishop and Mary Oliver (there was, in fact, for Bishop hardly any me at all). What seems to have saved both women is the hard, clear gaze of their poems, the large view: outward, across, away, up. But not always up. Sometimes down and precariously deep.

Oliver’s poems may start in the light of the natural world, but so many pass through or conclude in abject darkness...