Mary Oliver

Attentiveness and Devotion

I confess I’m a fan of Mary Oliver, but my reading of contemporary poetry isn’t informed enough to have made me aware, before today, that someone could admit such a thing “unashamedly.” That word appears in Ruth Franklin’s review of Oliver’s latest book, Devotions, when Franklin declares her affection for Oliver in the face of criticisms levelled against the poet. The review is titled “What Mary Oliver’s Critics Don’t Understand,” and although, by the end of it, I don’t quite understand what it is that Oliver’s critics don’t understand, I think it does a good job of at least pointing to some of the things I like about Oliver’s work. Continue reading →

Emerson’s Tricks and Sparks

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Essential Writings"I’ve been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s collected essays over the last couple of months, two or three each week, never more than one in a day. I’ve been familiar with the more famous essays for a long time now — I remember teaching “Self-Reliance” and my favourite essay, “Experience,” almost a decade ago — but at the start of this year it occurred to me that there were a number of essays I hadn’t read, so I decided to take a look at them all.

More than anything else, more than the quality of Emerson’s ideas, what I admire most about the essays is the incomparable rhetoric, the sheer extravagant beauty of the expression. Happily, I read them in the Modern Library’s collection of Essential Writings, edited by Brooks Atkinson and with an introduction by Mary Oliver. Even more happily, Oliver’s superb essay was made freely available online last year, so you can see for yourself how precisely she nails the essence of the Emersonian aesthetic: Continue reading →