In the title poem which begins ["No Voyage"], Mary Oliver recognizes that there is no possibility of voyaging beyond grief: in a "fallen city / On a cot by an open window," she comes to realize "Here or nowhere I will make peace…." Her courage is admirable, and the peace her best poems make with the world is rightfully uneasy. She is familiar with grief, she knows "the beast in the heart," and realizes that no distance can disguise any loss of love….
Her book is, in general, a record of what Frost called a "lover's quarrel with the world," and her best poems are lent tensile strength by the struggle within them between denial and affirmation. A reader can only feel that there is a considerable human being in, and behind, these poems…. One wishes that her … poems were less concerned with the trappings of poetry as such; she labors the word "sings," and too easily falls into such melodramatic metaphors as "the black stanzas of myself."
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