American Primitive
by Mary Oliver
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mary OliverEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1983-04-30
ISBN: 0316650048
Number of pages: 88
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Book Reviews of American Primitive
Book Review: A True Classic of Contemporary Poetry
Summary: 5 Stars
To read any poem by Mary Oliver is to be in the presence of the exquisite potential of language for marrying beauty and wisdom. Rarely a poet, so inclined not to impose her view nor her beliefs on anyone, can leave such profound impression on how we may come to see the world. And to read -to live, really- each poem of "American Primitive" is to educate your heart. Someone said, very appropriately so, that Oliver's poems may have the less humans in them than any contemporary poet's body of work, yet in the case of this magnificent book, two of its most stunning choices -"John Chapman" and "The Lost Children"- has Oliver bring the same keen compassion and awe for the tragic and the gracious in being our kind, that she does when speaking of foxes, mushrooms, or crows and owls.
"John Chapman," for instance, contains some of the wisest lines about being one of us, humans, that you will find in American poetry. Chapman was the real John Appleseed who "thought little, / on a rainy night, / of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching / flesh with any creatures there" and, yet, as a woman in the poems recalls "he spoke / only once of women and his gray eyes / brittled into ice. "Some / are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt / the pain of it, remembered it / into her old age."
I wonder if Oliver chose him because he lived his life during those times when this country was learning to be this country -and perhaps because of it- we were, for the last time, as close as a species to the rest of nature as we ever had.
"The Lost Children" is also about those times too, yet about those of one kind taken by those who were the natives to this land. It is an amazing feat of truth and empathy, as much as proof of Oliver's mastery of the poem's form and mood as in her capacity to imagine how the disappearance of these children could be as much a calling to another wondrous life and such grief and emptiness to those who will not see them anymore, at the same time.
Given the size limitations stipulated for these reviews, I'm not able to comment in the rest of these poems in the way their stunning depth and beauty deserve. The book's title -American Primitive- reaches a particular poignancy, for me, with every reading, "primitive" means essential, original, a natural and fierce morality.
As she says so certainly "To live in this world / you must be able / to do three things: / to love what is mortal; / to hold it / against your bones knowing / your own life depends on it; / and, when the time comes to let it go, / to let it go.
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