[The Night Traveler is] conventional in style and vision…. Judging from the rhythms of "Blackleaf Swamp" … [Mary Oliver] has read, and learned from, Frost; each of the 26 poems is carefully, beautifully, constructed around an image or event out of nature, or out of the poet's family life. The Night Traveler proposes that one lives in two worlds, that of the personal and familial, and that of the impersonal and inhuman. One is lonely in both….
[Oliver] sees the true "terror" of the country as nature's pitiless disregard for the individual, whether prey or predator; she cannot divide the world into victim and oppressor.
Joyce Carol Oates, "Poetry: 'The Night Traveler'," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1978 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 179, No. 24, December 9, 1978, p. 28.
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