Have not read Mary Oliver prior to this but I understand she’s a celebrated poet. Oliver, there's some good stuff here, and I love Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, too, but I gotta draw the line somewhere. My husband's face recoiled in a grimace and he said, 'What in hell are you reading?' Say what now? Wha? I literally read these two sentences about ten times in a row, then brought the book to my husband and read them aloud and asked, 'Is she saying what I think she's saying?' So I pursed my lips against that full moon, and I tasted the rich river of her body. Once I put my face against the body of our cat as she lay with her kittens, and she did not seem to mind. 'open mouthed' expressions of nature devotion, I came to these lines (dear God, please let someone be reading this review right now, because I need some hand holding here): White loved it, the way that Larry McMurtry and his characters love nature. she'll start talking about those 'open mouthed' kisses that she plants on trees and sticks and animals and whatnot, and it puts into my mind that bizarre moment from Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, Eat, Pray, Love when, at a yoga camp or wherever the hell she was, she suddenly mounts a tree and initiates foreplay.įolks, I love nature, but I love it the way E.B. Oliver is a kindred spirit, and I feel proud of her writing and long career.īut then. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.Īnd when I'm reading lines like these, I feel like Ms. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak, to be company. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing-an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness-wonderful as that part of it is. I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple-or a green field-a place to enter, and in which to feel.

For instance, in this collection, she ponders poetry: Sometimes, when I'm reading her work, I'm smiling or nodding and really feeling groovy. Oliver lives (a beaver hut?) is yet to be determined by me. I generally like most of her books, and it excites me to see someone making some kind of a living off selling poetry. Most of them are poetry, but a couple of them are essay collections (as Upstream is). I own, and have read, several of her books. I have a weird relationship with Mary Oliver.

Upstream by mary oliver