Jun 06, 2008  |  By: KATHI WOLFE  | COMMENTS     

Few poets address mortality, grief, love, our relationship with nature and the totality of the human experience as skillfully as Pulitzer Prize-winning lesbian poet Mary Oliver. In her 1998 poetry primer “Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse,” she wrote, “Poems speak of the mortal condition; … about the tragic and glorious issues of our fragile and brief lives.”
Oliver brings all of her experience to bear in her 12th and newest collection, “Red Bird.”

“Red Bird” comes three years after the death of her long-time partner, muse and literary agent, the photographer Molly Malone Cook. This volume doesn’t possess the grief-infused intensity of Oliver’s 2006 collection “Thirst,” written in the immediate aftermath of Cook’s death. In “Red Bird,” as with much of Oliver’s poetry, there is little direct reference to her relationship with Cook. (For more about the partnership, read Oliver’s beautifully written 2007 prose memoir “Our World.”)

“Red Bird” is filled with resurgence, renewal, love, faith and hope as well as elegy and critique of the violence against people, creatures and the ecology of this world — from the Iraq war to endangered polar bears. 

“Heart,/I implore you,/it’s time to come back/from the dark,” Oliver writes in the evocative, prayer-like poem “Summer Morning.” She goes on to plead “… Let the world/have its way with you,/luminous as it is/with mystery/with pain–/graced as it is/with the ordinary.”

BORN IN 1935 in Cleveland, Oliver combines images and observation of nature in her poetry. Her work, often compared to Whitman and Thoreau, conjures the walks and dunes of Provincetown, Mass., where she has lived for years. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin has called Oliver “an indefatigable guide to the natural world.”

Oliver has won many honors, including the National Book Award and then the Pulitzer for her 1984 book “American Primitive,” full of elegiac, lyric poems celebrating nature in America. In “Red Bird,” nature still is the focal point of Oliver’s aesthetic, personal and spiritual life.

“Owl in the black morning/ mockingbird in the burning/slants of the sunny afternoon/declare so simply/ to the world/ everything I have tried but still/haven’t been able to put into words,” she writes in “The Teachers.”  Referring to the loneliness and writer’s block felt so often by poets, Oliver continues, “… I listen to those teachers,/and others too–/....for they are what lead me/from the dryness of self/where I labor/with the mind-steps of language–/lonely,....”

In “The Red Bird,” Oliver takes stock of nature, the divine, the political world and her life, and she uses the creature as an image of, if not God, a God-like figure. In “Red Bird Explains Himself,” she writes, “…for truly the body needs/a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work,/the soul has need of a body/and I am both of the earth and i am of the inexplicable/beauty of heaven//where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,/and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart.”

Grounded in the problems of the modern age, such as the war in Iraq, Oliver’s political and lyrical pieces keep the collection from being sentimental or other worldly.

“I want to sing a song/for a body I saw/ crumpled/and without a name,” Oliver writes in “Iraq,” “…if I had known him,/on his birthday,/I would have made for him/a great celebration.”

“Of the Empire” and a few of the other social-issues poems in “Red Bird” seem forced. “We will be known as a culture that feared death/ and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity,” rings true, but comes off more like prose than poetry.

Yet, despite this minor caveat, Oliver’s imagery, spirit and lyricism shine in this vibrant volume.