[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 poets who are women, are able to strip down to the simple question; not many are able to speak as she does…. (pp. 212-13)
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