SOURCE: A review of New and Selected Poems, in The Georgia Review, Vol. 47, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 145-59.

In the following review, Kitchen notes a disparity between earlier poems which feature a division between nature and narrator and later poems in which the narrator becomes one with nature.

Her [Oliver's] New and Selected Poems reminds us of the territory she has covered since her first publications in the early 1960's, and I am glad to see some old favorites in this larger context. For example, "Ghosts" mourns the loss of the buffalo by imagining a time when they were abundant; then, with its insistent question—"have you noticed?"—the poem forces the reader to examine the silence of extinction, the blissful oblivion of those who have inherited the land. From an earlier book "Entering the Kingdom" remains an excellent example of how human consciousness divides us from our own...