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Mary Oliver
Jul. 17th, 2021 07:52 am
Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary OliverMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
It feels almost blasphemous to give this three stars, but I vastly prefer Oliver as a poet to Oliver as an essayist.
Most of these essays are quite fine until they veer off into a bit too much tree-kissing (literal tree kissing). There's also an entire essay about letting a spider hatch her babies (multiple rounds of babies!) in the stairwell that leads to the cellar, and I cannot follow where Oliver would lead in that instance (I am cringing in visceral horror even as type).
One of my favorite lines: (of snow) "the world smells like water in an iron cup" (134).
The last couple essays in the collection are about aging and nearing the end of her life and dovetail nicely with my reading of Atwood's most recent poetry collection Dearly which is almost entirely about those themes.
Worth a read for sure but I think I'll stick with the poems.
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( blathering about what Oliver has to say about writing )
