[Twelve Moons is a] book whose subject is nature and the place of human creature in it. When Oliver holds to her sense of respectful distance, the poems succeed very well; only when that hold slips do they become too anthropomorphic and sentimental, too much like animal fables. The poet lives in Provincetown and clearly spends a great deal of time outdoors, as one imagines Annie Dillard, covering miles of fields and woods, then halting, motionless, attentive, for hours, "Entering the Kingdom."… The figure of the crows [in this poem] tells the ambiguity of her position, for they are at once mythologized (as the angel at the gates of Eden) and yet, having been given a voice, they contradict their own speech, telling her how strange she is within the kingdom, how little entitled to her attributions of discourse. Like the paradox of the liar, the poem swings back and forth, riddling.
You could almost use this book as a field guide (and it is entirely à propos to recall here Robert Hass's beautiful Field Guide): surely one function of a poet/naturalist is to tell the reader to go out and look. When we go out just to look we are admittedly tourists, but this guide sometimes self-consciously tries to compensate for the way in which names divide and dismember the wild, and offers as well acute observation…. (pp. 302-03)
Emily Grosholz, "Poetry Chronicle: 'Twelve Moons'," in The Hudson Review (copyright © 1980 by The Hudson Review, Inc.; reprinted by permission), Vol. XXXIII, No. 2, Summer, 1980, pp. 302-03.
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