In the following essay, McNew discusses why contemporary critics have difficulty analyzing Oliver's poetry within the framework of the romantic tradition.

In the following essay, Graham discusses Oliver's (and by extension, her readers') ability to "become" the various natural bodies she writes about.

In the following interview, Oliver discusses poetry criticism, poetry workshops, and how her poetry has changed since her early work.

In the following essay, Alford discusses the positive, life-affirming aspects that Oliver's poetry uncovers in nature.

In the following review, Barber praises Oliver for her unique presence in contemporary poetry, but finds that New and Selected Poems fails to adequately show her growth as a poet.

Wright is an American poet and educator. In the following review, she finds in Oliver's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection both stunningly original and cliched elements.

In the following essay, Oliver discusses the mechanics of poetry and how length and tone variations can result in a wide range of effects.

In the following review of New and Selected Poems, Kumin praises Oliver for "reaching for the unattainable while grateful for its unattainability."

In the following review, Smith praises A Poetry Handbook for providing an incisive guide for students of poetry and notes an emphasis on storytelling and mythmaking in White Pine.

In the following excerpt, Oppenheimer reviews New and Selected Poems and praises Oliver for maintaining an honest balance in her portrayals of nature.

In the following excerpt, Baker questions the "isolationist" and "righteous" tendencies in Oliver's poetry.

In the following review, Swanson finds House of Light to be a contemplative exploration of the paradoxes of nature to reveal the self.

In the following review, Kitchen notes a disparity between earlier poems which feature a division between nature and narrator and later poems in which the narrator becomes one with nature.

In the following review, Steinman finds an "almost romantic lyricism" in Dream Work that floats over a deeper personal perspective of the past.

Gilbert is an American editor, educator, and critic. In the following review, she applauds Oliver for mining the natural world to "learn the lessons of survival."

In the following review of New and Selected Poems, Selman praises Oliver's composure, sincerity, and dedication to her subject.

In the following excerpt, Hosmer reviews New and Selected Poems and praises Oliver's work for its simplicity and clarity.

In the following review of House of Light, Howard finds that Oliver's poems "evoke the fears, sorrows, and joys of the solitary spirit."

Ostriker is an American poet, editor, and educator. In the following excerpt, she applauds the lyricism of Dream Work and notes a shift in emphasis from the natural world in Oliver's earlier works to more human-based themes in this collection.

Kuzma is an American poet. In the following review of Dream Work, he praises Oliver's "purity of motive" in expressing the gracefulness of nature.

In the following excerpt, Sampson asserts that House of Light "yields … to everything in nature that is holy."

In the following excerpt, Dobyns reviews New and Selected Poems and notes the consistency in tone and an "increased precision with language" over the thirty-year period featured.

Tillinghast is an American poet and educator. In the following review, he praises Oliver for handling "description with a satisfying, jeweler's precision" in White Pine.

In the following excerpt, Richman reviews House of Light and finds it to be an optimistic work concerned with the cycles of life.

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 th...

In the following review, Reynolds applauds Oliver for going beyond a how-to format to "connect the conscious mind and the heart."

In the title poem which begins ["No Voyage"], Mary Oliver recognizes that there is no possibility of voyaging beyond grief: in a "fallen city / On a cot by an open window," she comes to realize "Here or nowhere I will make peace…." Her courage is admirable, and the peace her best poems make with the world is rightfully uneasy. She is familiar with grief, she knows "the beast in the heart," and realizes that no distance can disguise any loss of l...

Mary Oliver uses her poems [in No Voyage] to recall in the most controlled tones the country scenes of her childhood and adolescence. She is gifted with a kind of emotional total recall, so that, within very strict limits, every shade of meaning is included. Judging from the poems about her adult life, she needs those about her earlier years to maintain her sense of balance between current uncertainties and isolation and the solidly recognizable joys, sorrows, and companionships of the past. There is little...

Kaufman is an American educator and writer. In the following excerpt, he finds Oliver's poems in No Voyage, and Other Poems to be more personal than the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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 ...

[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 persona...

[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."...

In the following review, Upton notes Oliver's connection of dissimilar images in House of Light.

[Mary Oliver is good in "No Voyage"] but predictably good; one could have foretold her form reading anthologies and the poetry magazines of the day. She never seems quite to be in her poems, as adroit as some of them are, but is always outside them, putting them together from the available literary elements. (p. 61) One can see how the items sort of inform each other and make a comprehensible statement, but it is made at the cost of the imaginatively personal statement that might have occurred...

[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 ...