Customer Reviews

American Primitive

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

I was really impressed by "American Primitive," the collection of poems by Mary Oliver. I knew that this book was special when I got to the third poem, "The Kitten." This poem about a stillborn kitten stopped me dead in my tracks. Painful yet beautiful, tragic yet transcendent, it sets a powerful tone for the collection as a whole.

And "American Primitive" does indeed strike me as a unified whole. It consists mostly of poems about American wildlife, with some poems that touch on people in United States history. The poems are often about the cycles of life, including birth, death, and loss. In some poems eating becomes a transcendent act that points to the connectedness of all life.

Oliver writes about mushrooms, blackberries, crows, egrets, deer, snakes, whales, and other living things. She also writes about such natural phenomena as snow and sunlight. Her language is often striking and sensuous. I love the lines from "Spring" where she says "The rain / rubs its shining hands all over me." With her attentiveness to the natural world, Oliver reminded me somewhat of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but she really has a voice and vision all her own in "American Primitive."

To read any poem by Mary Oliver is to be in the presence of the exquisite potential of language for marrying beauty and wisdom. Rarely a poet, so inclined not to impose her view nor her beliefs on anyone, can leave such profound impression on how we may come to see the world. And to read -to live, really- each poem of "American Primitive" is to educate your heart.
Someone said, very appropriately so, that Oliver's poems may have the less humans in them than any contemporary poet's body of work, yet in the case of this magnificent book, two of its most stunning choices -"John Chapman" and "The Lost Children"- has Oliver bring the same keen compassion and awe for the tragic and the gracious in being our kind, that she does when speaking of foxes, mushrooms, or crows and owls.
"John Chapman," for instance, contains some of the wisest lines about being one of us, humans, that you will find in American poetry. Chapman was the real John Appleseed who "thought little, / on a rainy night, / of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching / flesh with any creatures there" and, yet, as a woman in the poems recalls "he spoke / only once of women and his gray eyes / brittled into ice. "Some / are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt / the pain of it, remembered it / into her old age."
I wonder if Oliver chose him because he lived his life during those times when this country was learning to be this country -and perhaps because of it- we were, for the last time, as close as a species to the rest of nature as we ever had.
"The Lost Children" is also about those times too, yet about those of one kind taken by those who were the natives to this land. It is an amazing feat of truth and empathy, as much as proof of Oliver's mastery of the poem's form and mood as in her capacity to imagine how the disappearance of these children could be as much a calling to another wondrous life and such grief and emptiness to those who will not see them anymore, at the same time.
Given the size limitations stipulated for these reviews, I'm not able to comment in the rest of these poems in the way their stunning depth and beauty deserve. The book's title -American Primitive- reaches a particular poignancy, for me, with every reading, "primitive" means essential, original, a natural and fierce morality.
As she says so certainly "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.

If you don't, you just might find it here. Oliver writes in snatches of brilliant lyrical imagery, yet weaves those bits together without fail into something larger than the reader expects. She is the master at making oblique connections to truths we know subconsciously, and she uses startling, beautiful, and fresh language to do so. When one reads Oliver's poems, it is the equivalent of wandering the streets of a new city amazed by the strange and wonderful sights and smells, only to round a corner and slam into your oldest friend. These poems are ideas your soul already knows, but your mind rarely does. Oliver is the translator between the two.

Oliver writes about natural objects that we all know and yet provides a unique look at them. Her voice is all her own, and that voice will inspire poets for years to come. She is the master.

From the author of The Difference Now, A New Dish, and At the Coffee Shop.

Anyone having had a close study of the body of human verse would recognize the mastery in Mary Oliver's poetry. American Primitive deserves all of the recognition it has received. It ties the elegance of transcendence to the reality of the contemporary world. It is a celebration of the human being and the human being's life-long companion, nature. Oliver's use of the English languge is polished, well-crafted, and wild. Mary Oliver's work takes its place along side of Kunitz, Milosz, and other contemporary masters. I was licking the pages. And, by the way, "P. Larkin," you're not fooling anyone.

Mary Oliver's American Primitive is one of the finer books of poetry written in America in the last fifty years. The poetry is simple, yet profound, and has intense energy and vitality. The poet never wastes a word or an idea, and though the poems have few humans beings they speak directly and movingly to the human condition.

"American Primitive" is among the finest books of poetry written by an American author in the last 25 years. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it is a precise and lucid notation of the natural world. Oliver does not shun away from the severe brutality of every day yet does not paint the beauty of nature's cycle with any diminishment. It has undoubtedly influenced my own writing and is a book I return to to find some sort of truth in accounting for the way things are

I don't know how Mary Oliver can write fifty poems about transcendence and nature and not once sound repetitive. Her voice is stunning. Startling, lucid, reverential... just gorgeous.

Beautiful. A great place to start if a reader has not read Oliver before. Not to be missed.

A wonderful book that moves me everytime I read it. It is a book that explores the natural world and how nature merges with our own internal landscapes. An important book!