Summary

The poems in Twelve Moons cover Oliver’s familiar ground in terms of an appreciation for the landscape she lives in, but they also include a greater number of human characters than the poems collected from Oliver’s later books. “Music Lessons,” for example, as the title suggests, offers a glimpse into a younger Oliver’s piano lessons, and a rare look at Oliver’s childhood. The poem mostly serves as a portrait of the piano teacher, as, through a young Oliver’s eyes, the reader watches the piano teacher become lost in the music, finding a transcendence which most of Oliver’s poems only find in nature. “The Night Traveller” is an experiment in personifying what Oliver loves about wildness, rather than, as she does more often later in her career, finding...