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 "rich / Lens of attention." Oliver assumes, as the Romantics and Hart Crane before her, that we have fallen away from a state of grace inhabited by our elders. Like … a number of poets now occasionally returning to technical formalism, her lines in "Stark County Holidays" demonstrate a powerful awareness of waning: "Our mother's kingdom does not fall, / But year by year the promise fades; / Dreams of our childhood warp and pall, / Caught in the dark fit of the world." Again, in lines freer, more open and characteristic, she seeks in "Morning in Massachusetts" to distinguish the genuinely nostalgic from the spuriously sentimental…. Clearly, Oliver knows what to make of a diminished thing.
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