LOOK, LISTEN, FIND YOURSELF

KIM SHIPPEY, SENIOR WRITER

Sentinel readers who are familiar with the delight Mary Baker Eddy took in "... giant hills, winged winds, mighty billows, verdant vales, festive flowers, and glorious heavens,"—which, she said, "all point to Mind, the spiritual intelligence they reflect" (Science and Health, p. 240)—will probably enjoy the work of a contemporary poet who says she was born

to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.

The poet is Mary Oliver, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for her anthology American Primitive. Those lines above come from "Mindful," one of the poems reprinted in her 15th collection New and Selected Poems, Volume Two, which came out toward the end of last year. It includes 42 new poems, and 69 poems chosen by Oliver from six of her last eight books.

As so often with Oliver from Oliver, you feel she is always ready to be surprised by joy. She invites us to share her exhilaration over fields and flowers, owls, dogs, stars, and deer. She holds out a dozen tiger lilies, "soft as the ears of kittens" and "warm in recognition of the summer day." She suggests we might pause long enough to decide against condemning the abrasive squalling of coal-black ravens:

I have been in this world just
long enough to learn (not always easily) to love

my neighbors and to allow them every
possibility.

In such poems Oliver hovers on the brink of well-loved Bible truths, which she communicates through subtle understatement, leaving you free to take your own measure and decide your own response. She never tells you how to enjoy life, but consistently alerts you to its infinite promises.

Oliver is at her best when she just can't contain her delight in the "wordless, singing world" she explores on her walks. She warbles with the thrushes, fisher with the herons, and kneels in the dark earth to watch seed-grain "opening into the golden world."

In a poem on the white heron, Oliver sees the bird's broad wings as "wearing the light of the world," an echo of an earlier poem, "Poppies" (New and Selected Poems, Volume One), in which she says light

is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.

There's more about happiness in "Just Lying on the Grass at Blackwater," in which Oliver describes what she learns from a pink-beaked sparrow:

All afternoon
I grow wiser, listening to him,
soft, small, nameless fellow at the top of some weed,
enjoying his life. If you can sing, do it. If not,

even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness,
like praise,
from the pool of shade you have found beside the everlasting.

Oliver returns to light in her prose poem "What I Have Learned So Far," where she writes that "all kindness begins with the sown seed." Then she insists: "Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of light is the crossroads of—indolence, or action. Be ignited, or be gone."

It's refreshing to find a book of modern poetry so free of sadness, salaciousness, or sickness. I suspect most readers will be happy to be instructed "over and over / in joy, / and acclamation." And with a very special tour guide.

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