Mary Oliver, Eavan Boland, and Alice Oswald

Mary Oliver reading one of her poems at a conference in California.
Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Mary Oliver was one of my favourite US poets, so it was with real sadness

that I heard of her death at the grand age of 83. In fact a friend told me, via a text, so I was not the only female in west Wales to be affected by her passing.  But she was most loved,  perhaps, in her native American - she won a Pulitzer prize in 1984. For me, her poems touch my druid heart, as they  reflect a deep love of nature, a transendental connection to the spirit world and the human condition. Her poems were subtle yet straight, and ever hopeful. 


Because of her death, our last West Wales book club meeting started by reading  “The Summer Day” from 1992, which is probably her most well-known poem. 

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?

We talked together of how she it's possible she had an unhappy childhood which might have led her to a huge love of the natural world. In the 50s, she  made a pilgrimage  to New York where her favourite poet, Edna St Vincent Millay,  had recently died, and there met her life partner, Molly Malone Cook. Poet and photographer made a life together in Cape Cod, and it is that landscape she often wrote about, as here, in my favourite of hers, Wild Swans; 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

 She told Maria Shriver in an O Magazine interview, “I am not very hopeful about the Earth remaining as it was when I was a child. It’s already greatly changed. But I think when we lose the connection with the natural world, we tend to forget that we’re animals, that we need the Earth.” This last poem is considered by many as her finest work, a 'death poem that becomes a life poem', as Jay Parini said in the Guardian obituary.

Sleeping In The Forest 

I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

Eavan Boland, is an Irish writer now living and teaching in the USA, she mainly writes of the difficult position of women in Ireland. Cityscape, below, is a favourite of mine. I love the concentration on ‘elver’ –  on my first read, I didn’t recognise the word in the first two stanzas, where it’s used out of context. I really thought she’d invented a word. But it’s a perfect word to use for any silvery, wriggly line, such as a diver, the sudden, bright. low light of the evening sky, and a ‘yearning for the estuary’ which may be a reference to a longing to travel into the distance, which many of us have. Repeatedly seeded through the poem to fix ‘silver’ into your mind, it works as a sort of assonance. At first, the poem's got a very ‘yaowie’ sound…word, surface, waited, day, pause, …elver, how cirrus clouds, edge, elver…Then it begins to use more flat aa’s…Blackrock baths, cracks, I can I can I can, Harry, salt,  as, has, glass…

Cityscape

I have a word for it —

the way the surface waited all day

to be a silvery pause between sky and city —

which is elver.

And another one for how

the bay shelved cirrus clouds

piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea, 

which is elver too.

The old Blackrock baths 

have been neglected now for fifty years,

fine cracks in the tiles 

visible as they never were when

I can I can I can

shouted Harry Vernon as 

he dived from the highest board 

curving down into salt and urine

his cry fading out 

through the half century it took 

to hear as a child that a glass eel

had been seen 

entering the seawater baths at twilight —

also known as elver —

and immediately

the word begins

a delicate migration —

a fine crazing healing in the tiles —

the sky deepening above a city 

that has always been

unsettled between sluice gates and the Irish Sea 

to which there now comes at dusk

a translucent visitor

yearning for the estuary.

More recently, Alice Oswald has become renowned for writing 'nature verse' although understandably, she hates that nomenclature. Oswold is an Oxford graduate who now lives in Devon and loves gardening, ecology and music, all of which find their way subtly into her poetry. She became famous after the publication of her second book, Dart, which was the outcome of years of primary and secondary research into the history, environment, and community along the River Dart in Devon, England. But it's her later works that I really love which include Woods, etc. (2005), winner of a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Weeds and Wild Flowers (2009), illustrated by Jessica Greenman; A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009) and Falling Awake (2016). Here's a favourite of mine, from that collection, Slowed-Down Blackbird;

Three people in the snow

getting rid of themselves

               breath by breath

and every six seconds a blackbird

three people in raincoats losing their tracks in the snow

walking as far as the edge and back again

with the trees exhausted

              tapping at the sky

and every six seconds a blackbird

first three then two

passing one eye between them

and the eye is a white eraser rubbing them away

and on the edge a blackbird

trying over and over its broken line

trying over and over its broken line. 

Finally, here's a poem I wrote last spring, when I found a fallen fledgling. I looked for alliteration (beached boat), assonance, (cat-dragged…back…soft, moth…lift, tissue)… Integral rhythms (I want to live, fly, court, breed) simile (beached boat, moth wings,) and metaphor (cloaked in suede). I hope the poem explains some of how deeply affected I was when I found the fledging.

Fledgling

Cat-dragged to the back porch,

Your wings have micro feathers with pigeon patterns

Your rib cage humped as a beached boat

Cloaked in suede 

Breaths soft as moth wings,

Life is worth the fight.

I lift you on tissue to my palm

You are as light as any bird yet heavy with existence

Your outsized beak opens wide

As if I were your mother,

A silent cry – help me!

I want to live, fly, court, breed, 

Lay a clutch of eggs, raise a brood.

Within the kitchen towels, I twist your neck.

On the porch step I sit 

Heavy with death.