As their titles suggest (e.g., "Mussels," "The Black Snake," "The Fawn" and so on), Mary Oliver's poems [in "Twelve Moons"] are often informed by the drama of the natural universe, and engage the themes of death and transformation in an evidently highly worked language…. Though well intentioned, the craft has slid off into inverted syntax, easy and "purple" adjectives and clumsy alliteration…. [Some of her poems also suffer] from inflated rhetoric … and a not rigorous enough use of simile and metaphor. In "Snakes in Winter," each forked tongue is "sensitive as an angel's ear" and "lies like a drugged muscle." The "angel's ear" is straight literary conceit (i.e., who says that such ears are "sensitive" or that angels even have ears); the "drugged muscle" is almost a tautology.
Miss Oliver's poems also have the predilection suddenly to speak from the point of view of the thing they are rendering ("The Lamb," of course, is wholly in that mode), rather than let the continuing particulars carry full weight. Endings often fall with a too neat metaphysical crescendo from more austere beginnings: stanzas tend toward equal line count or poems are set as one large block, creating an illusion of tightness that is unfortunately belied by the aforementioned formal lapses as well as a "heaviness" of subject and tone. The somewhat spiritualized crows with the weighty "saves" and the moral-like assessment of death at the end of "The Storm" is an example of such ponderousness…. (pp. 24, 26)
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