American Primitive by Mary Oliver (1983)

The Pulitzer Prize winning fourth book by American poet Mary Oliver, published when she was 48.

Poetry Review: American Primitive is a book of nature poetry. If you like ponds, wind, trees, herons, wild grapes, bees, you will find them here in abundance. Mary Oliver is a nature poet. If you like passion, joy, exuberance, feeling, all of it honest, unironic, clear, credible, open, vulnerable, all that too is here. Mary Oliver is not hip or cool; she may be the best selling poet in America (I think Milk and Honey is giving that claim some pressure at the moment), and that hurts her street cred. But although Mary Oliver is not my favorite poet, I believe these poems will last longer than 80% of what's being written now. These poems will still be readable, accessible, 20, 30, 50 years from now when the fads and trends of the fashionably stylish hipster poets of today have faded and are forgotten. Future readers will still understand and feel and touch these poems, unless we've destroyed all nature and other creatures and are living in some Philip K. Dick horror of a world, and even then people will read Mary Oliver to learn and know what nature was like.

The poems in this book investigate the rich black of earth and berries, and a mystical whiteness of nature:

   ... three egrets --
         a shower
           of white fire!

or

   brushing over the dark pond,
   for all of us, the white flower
   of dreams.

The imagery is of water: ponds, creeks, pools, the harbor, the sea, a "field of dark water," and yet even more so of fire. The magic of nature is found burning, blazing, flaming -- ice burns in Oliver's world.

   igniting the fields,
   turning the ponds
   to plates of fire.

American Primitive seems about evenly divided between poems about the wild and poems about people interacting with the wild. The themes are the joy to be found in nature, the harshness of the cycle of life, the power, the wonder, beauty, strength, solace, enlightenment, realization, transcendence of nature. Each poem contains its own individual and unique moment and statement that it takes from the natural world. There's a spirituality here. She addresses death, ghosts, vultures, the wrongs of history. Some of the most powerful poems touch on the American Indians, the Sioux and the Shawnee. She says:

   ... there's a sickness
   worse than the risk of death and that's
   forgetting what we should never forget.

The book is dedicated to the great Ohio poet James Wright (Oliver, too, was an Ohioan), who died three years before American Primitive was published. There are lines here which would have fit well in his best book, The Branch Will Not Break, and Oliver's poem "Clapp's Pond" in particular reminded me of Wright. Mary Oliver was not young when she wrote this, and she shares some of her thoughts:

   To live in this world

   you must be able
   to do three things:
   to love what is mortal;
   to hold it

   against your bones knowing
   your own life depends on it;
   and, when the time comes to let it go,
   to let it go.

These poems, while not difficult, are more complex than the open clarity of much of Oliver's later work. Accessibility is not a bad thing. I read each poem twice, and a few three times, to get the meaning. And then I might've read each one more time just for the pleasure of it. American Primitive will make you feel new. [4★]