And the unadorned narrative of her failed rescue of a dying gull is powerful in its starkness. Her meditation on the inevitable loss of the beloved in a celebration of Edgar Allan Poe is stirring, until we meet some unsettling generalizations. My favorite essay, “Staying Alive,” skillfully interweaves an incident from the writer’s unhappy early years (about which Oliver is deliberately reserved), with both an explanation of how reading and the natural world delivered her from childhood psychological peril and an account of the life cycle of a family of foxes that she observes on her morning walks. When Oliver closely observes the natural world, and thus enacts her maxim that “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” she deftly engages the reader with her detailed worldview. There is much to admire in Mary Oliver’s collection Upstream. ‘Upstream: Selected Essays’ by Mary Oliver
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |