From Publishers Weekly
For better and for worse, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Oliver is a Romantic?capital R. She is enamored of nature, not the cute nature of spring flowers/ prancing fawns but Edmund Burke's awe-ful nature, with its "scream of the owl, which is not of pain and hopelessness and the fear of being plucked out of the world, but of the sheer rollicking glory of the death-bringer." Less fortunately, she also buys into romanticism's egomania: "My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth... My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o'clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all." As in her previous prose volume, A Poetry Handbook, Oliver meditates on her hard-to-define art and goes on to consider her inspirations?Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Muir, Walt Whitman. But the best part of the book is Oliver's plein-air poetizing, consisting of tidbits almost all jotted down "somewhere out-of-doors": in her partial observations of nature ("Just at the lacey edge of the sea, a dolphin's skull"), her exhortations ("You must not ever stop being whimsical") or an evocative list ("Molasses, an orange, fennel seed, anise seed, rye flour, two cakes of yeast"), readers catch the first whiffs of poetry.
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