For Mary Oliver, it’s love for the physical world and the bond between all living things. So says the blurb on the back cover of Devotions, her last collection of poems. Comprising nearly 450 pages, it contains work from her first book, published when she was 28, through her last, three years before she died at 83. What’s remarkable to me, aside from the beauty of the language and the endless flow of insights that she brings to light, is the coherence and consistency of her subject matter—the physical world, living things, the bonds between them.
I ask myself, what is mine? I usually say my work is devoted to explorations in healing art but that’s less a theme than a mission statement. Beginning in my thirties, I wrote narrative poems inspired by my experiences as a professional and family caregiver. As I age, my themes have broadened. I am not consistently drawn to nature or observations from everyday life, nor do I consider myself a confessional poet. I am not enamored of what I think of as high art, the inaccessible poems you puzzle over and eventually give up on. You could say I use language as a blind person uses a cane to feel her way down a path, slowly tap, tap, tapping and listening for what the taps tell about what she can’t see.
I tap my way along the ragged edges of science and art, health and illness, life and death, faith and doubt, orthodoxy and heresy. I want each poem to teach or reveal something, perhaps answer a question. I love what the Australian poet Les Murray wrote in “The Instrument” after asking himself the question, Why write poetry? One of his answers was For working always beyond / your own intelligence. Looking back at my most recent notebook entries I see that I am wrestling with the same question. I realize I don’t have to know the answer, just accept that, in Murray’s words, Breathing in dream-rhythm when awake and far from bed / evinces the gift.