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Why
I Wake Early by Mary Oliver.
Beacon Press. $14.00 paper.
Review by Tom Pynn
From
the first poem we understand why Mary Oliver wakes early: to stand in the
presence of things coming alive and participating in the life of things at once
particular—blacksnake, wren, trout lilly, ear bone of
pilot whale—and universal. There is a deep trust in the experience of ekstasis: “Everything in the world / comes. // At
least, closer. // And, cordially.” Hers is no trifling
observation of appearances but the willingness of the devotee in which looking
is an opening: “Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around /
as though with your arms open.”
Oliver has always been a
religious-philosophical poet involved in the life of the world, in the way of
her fellow New England Transcendentalist poets, but this book is her most
religiously devout poetry to date. Make
no mistake, Oliver is no theologian conceptualizing
the unknowable. Hers is the poetry of
one intimately connected to what is—
What do I know,
But this: it is heaven itself to
take what is given,
to see what
is plain.
Seeing
into the life of things in their terrible beauty has been a mainstay of
Oliver’s poetry. She writes, “I look;
morning to night I am never done with looking.” Peering at things up close
gives rise to her metaphysical musings on the nature and identity of the soul:
Understand, I am always trying to
figure out
What the soul is,
And where hidden,
And what shape.
While
Oliver’s poetry communicates her experiences of things alive and part of an
on-going harmonious song of being, she is also painfully aware of the assault
against the natural world: “Loving the earth, seeing what has been done to it,
/ I grow sharp, I grow cold.” Yet, despite the loss of beautiful places she has
known and the lives therein, Oliver does not lose touch with her practice of
waking early: “This morning I watched
the deer / with beautiful lips touching the tips / of the cranberries.” A life of peering at things up close allows us
to see that things “disappear—but not, of course, vanish / except to our
eyes.” Such ambiguity the poet
communicates is a life lived in both difficult hope and a “lingering in
happiness.”