Runciman, Lex, "Knocking on Nature's Door: Religious Meaning in Twentieth Century U.S. Poetry," Literature of Nature, Patrick Murphy, editor, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998.

This essay has a section devoted to Oliver discussing her notion of nature as "an ever-renewing and endlessly elemental present."

Oliver,  Mary American Primitive,Boston:  Little  Brown, 1983.

This collection of Oliver's poems won the Pulitzer Prize and is primarily concerned with pastoral subject matter.

Oliver, Mary, House of Light, Boston: Beacon, 1990. This volume contains poems of air and seaside and is dominated by poems about birds.

Oliver, Mary, Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

While the title of this book is self explanatory, the book also includes a hundred pages of poems that serve as examples. The book is written clearly and simply for those without a background in technical...