The news Mary Oliver reports in The Night Traveler is not the kind to be found in our daily papers, but will be familiar to anyone with an abiding interest in the nether world of dreams and the shadowy regions of the unconscious. Her chapbook contains twenty-six poems which confront and often release the generative power of first forms residing in the human psyche. The descent into the interior depths announces a process of journeying begun in "Sleeping on the Island," the first poem, where the essential self is uncovered … and ends in a moment of promise in "Messages," the last: "And at last one tree / Hovers, hollow, / Tall as a lighthouse: the secret / Castle of honey."

Between these two points Oliver charts a world not fashionably surreal but authentically mythic in its dimensions. Her concerns are the eternal ones—death, change, loss, illusion—all seen through the...