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Thirst, Mary Oliver. Beacon Press. 2006. $22.00 , cloth.

At Blackwater Pond, Mary Oliver. Beacon Press. 2005. $19.95 (CD.)

Review by Tom Pynn

Man was made for joy and woe,

And when this we rightly know

Through the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,

A clothing for the soul divine.

Under every grief and pine

Runs a joy with silken twine.

--William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence" (c. 1804)

Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.

--Mary Oliver, "Epilogue: Thirst"

My Work is Loving the World

For Mary Oliver, the work of poetry is a mysterious combination of what cannot be learned ("Everyone knows that poets are born and not made in school" [Poetry Handbook, 1994]), a disposition to be with the world compassionately, to peer up close at things at once finding solace and wonder; and the steady cultivation of craft. Her conception and practice of the craft of poetry, however, is inseparable from her "lingering" forays into the world. From Whitman on we are shown that intentional consciousness is not the disembodied Cartesian mind/soul reducing bodies to abstraction, but embodied consciousness. As Olson wrote in Projective Verse:

the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE

the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.

In the "Introduction" to her Handbook, Oliver echoes the American Bardic tradition in poetry from Whitman to Williams to Olson: "How can the content be separated from the poem's fluid and breathing body?" Which is to say, the poet's body; which is to say the body of the world.

What does the poet bring? In the opening poem of Thirst, "Messenger," it is not simply a matter of the medium being the message, but that medium, message and messenger evolve together:

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird--

equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.

Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

What the poet brings, what Oliver offers, is poetry bringing our attention toward a living relation with things: head, ear, and heart WITH syllable, breath, and line. The first movement in this living relation with things "is mostly standing still and learning to be/ astonished." Correlative with "standing still" is noticing what is before one's own embodied mind: The poem "Walking Home from Oak-Head" begins with the line, "There is something." Philosophers and poets alike have noticed this and acknowledged the initiatory awareness or ontological wonder: that something is without there ever being a reason for its being. Ontological parity before any epistemological or technological hierarchy of things: "equal seekers of sweetness."

The poet also brings to our attention, if we have eyes to listen, that WHO is prior to any WHAT. The poet suggests that a living ethical relation is the face to face encounter with another living being in a world alive with living beings. There is no static background upon which we live. Life is a swarming of living things we are always already in the midst of. The poet shows us that our comportment towards things is much more important and will yield a deeper understanding of things than the imposition of a contrived frame of reference--subject and object-- that reduces a thing to the mind's sure utility. In "Ribbon Snake Asleep in the Sun" Oliver tells us that

though the books say

it can't be done, since his eyes are set

too far apart in the narrow skull, I'm not

lying when I say that he lifts his face and looks

into my eyes and I look back until

we are both staring hard

at each other.

The poet brings us into the moment of truth. Truth not as verifiable/falsifiable proposition (poetry is not the language game of empirical science), but as event in which one is trued or attuned to another in an ever-widening and deepening present moment. WHAT the snake is or WHAT the snake does, "is a small matter. What I would speak of, rather, / is the weightless string of his actually soft and/ nervous body; the nameless stars of his eyes."

That time/ I thought I could not/ go any closer to grief/ without dying

Living close to things, living in the intimate fragility of living relation will not always bring joy. When at the end of "Ribbon Snake Asleep in the Sun" Oliver wants to speak of "his actually soft and/ nervous body," she tells us what all poets would tell us: there is anxiety, fear, loss and grief in the world too. This is the difficulty of compassion: that we acknowledge and respond well to the suffering in the world that is within and without us. In Thirst, the weight of human grief is shown in several ways.

"Musical Notation: 1" can be read as a meditation on the grief that comes of failing to acknowledge the depth of our natal pact with the things of this world. "The pear orchard," she writes, "is not only profit, but a paradise of light." To see a WHO as a WHAT begets a grief born of (ab)using the world. Brute utility erects a grief barrier between the living world and us impoverishing all within it. Even if we do not recognize grief, we at times do notice that we are not happy. In this poem, even the two dogs mentioned are enthralled with particularity in its physical manifestations. Such adoration of flowers, such predilection for sunsets establishes and continues a living bond with living things that is not only our birthright, but also engenders happiness.

Yet, as some of the poems collected in Thirst attest to, our failure to notice things as they are often results from the grief-bound weight of everydayness. In "Logan International" what appears to be a poem about waiting for a flight delayed by a snow storm quickly turns into a meditation on our own "baggage." Indeed, Oliver notes that "For one thing, / there is too much baggage." Yes, there is the literal reference that we are weighed down by accumulating too much stuff; however, when she writes in the poem's only couplet

What is it that you need so badly?

Think about this.

She asks us to consider the difference between what we need and what we want, but more significantly, she points us towards ourselves, asks us to consider ourselves seriously. We often fail to notice things in the spirit of wonder as children so often do: "the babies, the little ones, hot and tired, / but still / gurgling, chuckling, as they looked." Is this, then, the sense of grief hinted at in the poem's closing line: "upon this broken world?" What seems to be broken is our living relation to things and ourselves.

The poet herself is not immune to grief. First there is the grief of self-consciously knowing that one is in some way incomplete. In "When I Am Among the Trees" Oliver writes

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

As in "Logan International" Oliver alludes to the burden of everydayness, of getting distracted by daily routines to the extent that one loses "connection" with the ordinary, the things that really matter. The trees both remind her of this grief and point the way, by example of their own "hints of gladness" and "the light [that] flows from their branches," beyond grief: "'It's simple', they say, / 'and you too have come / into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled / with light, and to shine."

Yet it is also true that grief comes to us not of our own making. There is at least one more sense of grief in Thirst; a grief that haunts many of these pages. Readers of Oliver's books will have no doubt notice that she has dedicated most of her books to Molly Malone Cook. In Thirst's dedication we note Molly's death. This is the grief we all share with the poet, or will come in time to share with Oliver. In the poem "Heavy" grief is the force that moves her close to death, closer but not dying. Though her devotion to God and the companionship of friends had much to do with this,

Still, I was bent,

and my laughter,

as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.

Let me look closer, and a long time

Though many of Oliver's poems in this volume are laced with the grief we all bear in our own ways, the grief it is the poet's burden to share with us and to indicate for us, it is also true that many of the poems that begin in grief end in love. "Heavy" is a case in point. "'It's not the weight you carry,'" the poet's "friend Daniel" tells her, "'but how you carry it'." Grief is not simply a burden we carry, but grief can be taken up as a practice. Like any other practice, we take up and put down grief according to the day's measure and our own fortitude In time, practice transforms our mind and body attuning us to the greater whole our grief initially separates us from. Upon taking up the practice of grief, the poem turns away from grief toward love as " the laughter / that comes, now and again, / out of my startled mouth?"

With the return of laughter is also the poet's vocation of looking closer at the things of the world:

How I linger

to admire, admire, admire

the things of this world

that are kind, and maybe

also troubled--

roses in the wind,

the sea geese on the steep waves,

a love

to which there is no reply?

Kindness and trouble appear together as equally deserving of admiration: roses harried by the wind, the sea geese on the tumultuous waves. Does the eye that sees with equanimity reveal "a love / to which there is no reply?"

Reprise: Of the ways/ towards thanks, and praise

It has often been remarked that the mouth that genuinely speaks a word of thanks is the same mouth that is capable of praising life as it comes, the moments of grief and the moments of joy. In "The Place I Want to Get Back To," we learn that the poet lives in a house she has named "Gratitude." Gratitude is a practice too and we come to such praising as we can and when we can. Sometimes, as in "The Uses of Sorrow," we come to such recognition slowly:

Someone I loved once gave me

A box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

That this, too, was a gift.

More often is the case in these poems, however, that we fall short of how, in our own self-estimation we imagine we would give thanks and praise to love and life. Ironically and paradoxically, it is often the case that gratitude is the place one longs to get back too. Life is a practice that reminds us of our remembering and forgetting "the way to the Way." Patience and humility can go a long way toward helping us remain with what is ours. "Another morning," Oliver writes in the volume's Epilogue "Thirst," "and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have."

As for poetry and the poet, thanksgiving and praising are perlocutionary speech acts; that is, what they say is what they are. Poets perform and the language of poetry is performative. Oliver is sincere when she asks, "How can the content be separated from the poem's fluid and breathing body?" In her "Performance Note" to her CD At Blackwater Pond, Oliver observes that "Much of the work of the poet is a mystery. The last labor is clear; it is the delivery of the poem . . .. The poem is meant to be given away, best of all by the spoken presentation of it." If the poem has anything to say, if the poem broaches the sayable, then it must also be hearable:

the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE

the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.

Listening to Mary Olver read poems selected from seven of her previous volumes is to hear the voice of an older woman giving away not only the lines of her poetry, but also the astonsihment and wonder of her lingering forays in the world. It is to hear the depth of the lines resonant of her body, she breathes the poem into life, though on the page they read well enough. Yet, when words are simply read off the page, there is too much room for ideas to overwhelm things even if the poet writes in utmost humility. The reader will read as s/he will. There is no escape, however, from the voice. Hearing there is less chance for arbitrary interventions of thought. Our body's natal pact with the things of this world is in part an acoustic involvement such that one may hear--if one has ears--to hear not only with the literal ears or the metaphorical ears of the mind, but the ears in the center of the chest.

What Mary Oliver writes of Dylan Thomas' reading voice is also true of her reading voice: "animation . . .elation, and authority."