Why I Wake Early (review)

It was the memorable French poet Paul Celan who perhaps best articulated what we've all felt about poets in the process of their making, and the poetry that results: "In this language I have sought, during those years and the years since then, to write poems: so as to speak to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself." Which, of course, most accurately, and acutely, applies to the poetry of Mary Oliver. For Oliver, who has already delivered such towering volumes of poems, including American Primitive and White Pines, is "that quiet person" continually in the world, in the sense of outdoors, walking, looking, seeing, listening, "fingering shells" pasted together, keenly observing the "ball of the foot and wide heel/and the naily, untrimmed/toes" of the bear track, and in doing so is not only taking the measure of what she finds, but more crucially the measure of her soul ("I am always trying to figure out/what the soul is"). And in this figuring out, although the project is never finished ("I believe I will never quite know./Though I play at the edges of knowing"), Oliver finds her bearings, not by looking at the self in the inherited egocentric sense of human as the central character, but rather by seeking out an immaterialism that is immersed in the material, a reality without surrendering all that is or makes an individual, a counter-stipulation where the self is not overcome by the world,/but through the world finds renewal: "to keep us from ever-darkness,/to ease us with warm touching,/to hold us in the great hands of light . . . " Which is an antidote to human frailty, a strengthening, not a diminishing, of the human condition, and so after walking, after seeing, after listening, Oliver in her most recent volume, Why I Wake Early, gives us a book of praise.

For a case study, we need look no further than the title poem, "Why I Wake Early," where Oliver addresses the query posed in the title by turning to the morning sun:

Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields . . . best preacher that ever was, dear star that just happens to be where you are in the universe . . . Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

On this occasion Oliver is making the gestures of one invested to the point of faith; in the sense of having given herself over to this world, to her craft, the one so enthralled that she has no other means of expression except praise. And we should not let pass the sincerity of the utterance found in the book's epigraph ("Lord! who hath praise enough?"). Nor should we let pass Oliver's crisp choice of this literary gem, for its author, the English poet, George Herbert, is an important religious poet from seventeenth century, at a time before naturalism, before romanticism, even before the enlightenment, a poet who says "praise" and means it in its most genuine, and faithful, acceptation. Oliver's point is, thus, not to turn from death, or life, and not to insist on the individual, but to regard life in a sense of discovery, in the context where it resides.

This praise, this virtually religious experience, is not an ecstasy of isolation and it is not instantaneous combustion. Rather, it is derived from the careful, insightful looking at the world, by which Oliver means "not just standing around, but standing around/as though with your arms open." What follows then are poems describing her itinerate musings, including most notably "Have You Seen Blacksnake Swimming?," "Look and See," "This World," "Mindful," and "Spring at Blackwater: I Go Through the Lessons," and from her walking, her listening, her examination of the fecund record of the earth, love is spawned:

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!      What a task           to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is...