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Backlist: Review Little Alleluias Thomas March Long Life: Essays and Other Writings Mary Oliver Da Capo Press http://www.dacapopress.com 118 pages; paper, $16.00 Mary Oliver's Long Life is a collection of enthusiasms in which exclamation points abound. In poetry, prose poetry, and prose that is sometimes awfully purple, Oliver celebrates the Massachusetts coast. "Writing poems, for me. . .is a way ofoffering praise to the world," Oliver observes, and she asks that we regard the poems here as "little alleluias." Throughout the book, an attitude of appreciation consistently emerges—appreciation as gratitude, as praise, and as considered understanding. Sadly, these are not always present at the same time, and without the benefit of considered understanding, readers may not appreciate why something is worthy of gratitude or praise. There is more to awe than the exclamation point. Oliver's foreword is a brief sketch on the difference between poetry and prose. Many subtle thinkers have tackled the question of this difference without finding clean distinctions. Oliver is no different. And although she acknowledges the "many moods of prose," she ultimately compares poetry and prose to winged and harnessed horses, respectively—while poetry can "fly," prose can only "plow." Such a distinction shouldn't be necessary simply because the book contains both poetry and prose. Why would she attempt to lower our expectations of her prose by comparing it to a draft horse? The book is her "comment," she tells us, in response to the question '"Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?'" Surely she would want no part of that to be "plowed" through. Then again, there are the essays in Part Three, reprinted introductions from Modem Library Classics editions of works by Emerson and Hawthorne. Making up roughly thirty pages ofthis already-slim collection, they are out of place in tone, subject matter, and style. Perhaps these are writers whose visions of New England have influenced Oliver's own. But it's as if she couldn't be bothered once more to make her observations anew. In fact, we learn of their original purpose only when she apologizes for repeating, in the second essay about Hawthorne, information that we will already have learned in the first. She explains that this repetition has been unavoidable, as these were introductions for two different books. But why is it the reader's job to navigate such repetitions? Just as it is common to reprint one's work, it is common to revise for republication. Maybe that would have felt like plowing. The Emerson piece, though, includes some remarks that help us to piece together Oliver's idea of appreciation in literature. She writes that "[t]he best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible." No surprise, the exuberant Oliver advocates the liberating powers of literature.' But consider also what she says soon after: "Answers are no part of it; rather, it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self-quarrels, his own predicament." The point, then, is not first to teach or to transform but to reveal, in the moment of rhapsody, appreciation as praise and gratitude —but also to reveal, in the persuasiveness of that rhapsody, that the reader has access to a thorough appreciation of what has brought the poet to the moment of praise. Oliver is effective in this persuasive art, when she cares to be—as when writing about her dogs, or her partner, or even the town dump. She can be openly reflective and take the time to luxuriate in details that reveal the beauty of things that a casual eye might overlook or dismiss as odd or insignificant. In the essay "Dog Talk," she writes with convincing affection about two dogs, Ben and Bear. She watches their expressions, rejoices in their adventures. Comparing free dogs to those on leashes, she writes: "[T]he one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk— is what a chair is to a tree." We appreciate this comparison less for its cleverness...

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