[What attracts me in Twelve Moons] is the intellectual delay it creates. Most of these poems function in such a way as to combat absolute cerebral comprehension. The imagery forms a bridge between the self rising and the self falling away. Mary Oliver must have walked time and again where she would not have to write this way; for there is surely more evidence of continued process than of ultimate completion. The results are therefore predictable: psychic and emotional information that spans both the personal and the collective unconscious.

In all of this, though, I do find poems that could have been omitted, poems overwritten. I hesitate to point this out because I did like this book a great deal…. Now I can only attribute this artful excess to fear. And there is more than ample justification for that. Not many poets—I must say it—not many...