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Red Bird, Mary Oliver, 2008, Bloodaxe Books. £8.95 ISBN 978-1-8522481-1-6

“... each poem is a pleasure
in itself with its own deeper
complexity to be engaged
with and relished”

‘Luminous’ (poetry), the back cover tells us ‘extending the visionary American tradition of Whitman, Emerson, Frost and Emily Dickinson.’ It’s a good start. The poems in Red Bird shine with light, whether it’s ostensibly visible light, or spiritual vision, or cries for light from the darker places in which we find ourselves in the depths of winter, trouble and war.

It’s worth noting that Oliver herself refers to Emerson and Whitman in her poem, Not This, Not That: “oh for you, oh ghosts of Emerson and Whitman”.

Oliver speaks with, for the most part, simple language and a conversational style, yet with a musicality of the sort that enters and touches us without conscious recognition. These are soft and beautiful poems. There are so many quotations I’d like to give you that they’d fill an entire chapter. The poems draw principally on nature, nature as God (and vice versa), presenting some extraordinary statements, or rather seemingly extraordinary because of the way they are presented (“Someday we’ll live in the sky”, Boundaries; “When I think of death / it is a bright enough city”, Visiting the Graveyard).

In the first part of the collection, the message may at first seem ‘samey’ (“I am grateful”, Red Bird; “the world / so full, so good” Another Everyday Poem), yet look again – each poem is a pleasure in itself with its own deeper complexity to be engaged with and relished. If overly anthropomorphic on occasion – “her sorrowless... self” of the ocean in Ocean; “but for sheer delight and gratitude” of goldfinches singing, Invitation; the voice of an anti-philosophical dog, Percy – there is balance in the voices – in Straight Talk from the Fox “(people) talking about God / as if he were an idea instead of... /...the rabbit caught / in one good teeth-whacking hit...” and “There is corn in the field, / what should I think of else?” Crow Says.

Further into the collection, there is an apparent departure, in both meaning and form, as we find more overtly environmental poems (“Come, children, hurry – there are so many / more wonderful things to show you in / the museum’s dark drawers”, Showing the Birds) and political poems. You don’t get much more overt than this entire short poem with its striking title, weightier than the poem itself (or better use of a comma, as in the last line, to control the reading from the page):

Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears
Trying to Survive on the Melting Ice Floes

That God had a plan, I do not doubt.
But what if His plan was, that we would do better?

The theme moves on then to love poems, including a sequence (according to the cover, Oliver’s ‘firstever cycle of love poems’), called Eleven Versions of the Same Poem. This is part five, So Every Day:

So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,
one of which was you.

In the last poem, of openly-stated spirit and faith, Red Bird Explains Himself and, much as I like what he says, there is one particular poem, Sometimes, in seven short pieces, which struck me as ‘essence of Oliver’ and I leave you (hopefully, relating part 4 also to your reading decision...!) with a little of it:

I don’t know what God is.
I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.           (from part 1)

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!               (from part 3)

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.                                                         (part 4)