Mary Oliver is a poet and these essays of hers are poetic. I believe she writes metaphorically even here in these essays, to get across her meaning. She shows she is taking in nature, in all ways. Perhaps she did or did not actually kiss that oak tree "every first day of spring for the last thirty years." Or eat those turtle eggs. Maybe? Or not. Does it matter? Oliver is showing us her wild youth and how she continued in this way, and that it gives her life and meaning.
My favorite parts of this short book are in the third section where she discusses Emerson, Poe, Whitman and Wordsworth. These are about Oliver herself, but also about the writers as well, and their works.
The last essay, "Provincetown" is a nice tribute to the town he lived in for much of her life. Yet it feels less crafted then most of her other essays.
A partial on her take on Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman:
The twelve poems of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass consist of one huge and gleaming Alp followed by a relaxed undulation of easily surmountable descending foothills. The initial poem, “Song of Myself” (sixty-two pages), is the longest and the most critical. It is the Alp. If the reader can “stay with” this extended passage, he has made a passage indeed. The major demands of the poem are here established, the first and essential lesson given in the first half-dozen lines:
I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease … observing a spear of summer grass. (pg.27)
In these lines the great work is begun, and the secret of success has been given. And what is that great labor? Out-circling interest, sympathy, empathy, transference of focus from the self to all else; the merging of the lonely single self with the wondrous, never-lonely entirety. This is all. The rest is literature: words, words, words….
(Pages 96-67)
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