Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays, by Mary Oliver. Boston: Beacon Books, 2003

Christine Holland

I have been carrying Mary Oliver’s book with me recently as I care for a loved one with a serious illness and have found it a most comfortable companion. It contains 26 poems--ten previously uncollected--two previously unpublished pieces, and two essays. The first essay, “Owls,” was included in Blue pastures (Oliver, 1995) and appeared in The best essays of 1996. The second essay, “Bird,” a moving tribute to an injured gull that Oliver and her longtime companion cared for until the bird’s death, is available nowhere else. In addition, the book is illustrated with lovely pencil drawings of feathers. The illustrator is uncredited.
The poems mark a sort of year’s cycle, starting with the springtime migration of “Wild Geese,” and ending back in that fecund season with “Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond,” in which the speaker tells us,
As for life,
I’m humbled,
I’m without words
sufficient to say
how it has been hard as flint
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over. (p. 60)

In a last poem, “Backyard,” that serves as Afterword, a garden has been left to grow undisciplined and unattended:
Blackberries, ferns, leaves, litter
totally without direction management
supervision. (p.65)
It’s a lovely grace note, leaving the reader with an image of a place both domestic and wild existing in a long, soft summer. The book ends with, “The birds loved it” (p. 65).

A large part of Oliver’s enduring appeal is her ability to convey the ecstatic engagement she feels with nature. The attentive reader of her poems even may experience something of the same feeling of transcendent union with the natural world, which she achieves by attending closely enough to enter imaginatively into it. “The Dipper” describes that bird as seen by the speaker when she was a child:
I had to
bend forward, as it were
into his frame of mind, catching
everything I could in the tone,
cadence, sweetness, and briskness
of his affirmative report. (p. 2).
Again, in “Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond:”
Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective. (p. 60)
Each poem in this little book reiterates that experience of “bending forward” to listen, of being dazzled, and reflective. The reader is invited to hear and reflect along with the speaker, to feel the dazzlement; and every time the experience is different, as particular as the individual birds being observed.

This book would make a lovely gift for a bird-loving friend or a good choice to introduce young students to Oliver’s work. The poems are accessible and cover a range of the poet’s abiding themes:
the world is full of leaves and feathers,
and comfort, and instruction. (p. 3)
That careful attention to other-than-human lives (in this case, bird lives) provides (a) consolation for the heart, mind, and imagination in a world where death is a constant, looming presence like the owls that fly through several poems; b) the “pragmatic mysticism” explored by Christensen (2002), which is a pantheistic apprehension of the energy that fuels the cycles of life, death, and seasons in the world around us as holy mystery; and (c) the delights of listening to and translating into human language the feats of love and survival played out in these small lives.

One can (and I have) quibbled with the raison d’etre of this collection. It breaks no new ground for the poet. More than half of its poems have been published in earlier books. No obvious thematic or literary force drives its content beyond the idea of collecting poems and essays about birds. Oliver’s most recent book of new poems, What do we know appeared in 2002, and this handsome little book has the feeling of being “filler” until she has enough material for another book-length collection.

These objections notwithstanding, I’ve enjoyed the book and have turned to it for solace and distraction in emergency wards and hospital rooms. In “Singapore,” first published in House of light (Oliver, 1992) and not in this collection, Oliver writes, “A poem should always have birds in it” (p. 6). Birds, for Oliver, embody the qualities of courage, playfulness, rhythm, and joy that seem to drive her poetry. At their best, these poems about birds evoke their subjects so precisely and with such affection that--for this reader at least--they create a space in the mind where the beauty and drama of the more-than-human world come alive.

* Christine Holland , Bennington College


References

Christensen, L. (2002). The pragmatic mysticism of Mary Oliver. In J. S. Bryson (Ed.), Ecopoetry: A critical introduction (pp. 135-152). Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press.

Oliver, M. (1992). _House of light. Boston: Beacon Press.

Oliver, M. (1995) Blue pastures. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Ward, G. C. (Ed.) (1996). Owls. In R. Atwan (Series Ed.), The best american essays 1996. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company


 

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