Red Bird

Mary Oliver’s transcendent nature poetry has earned her a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and, most recently, the title of the nation’s best-selling poet. In Red Bird, her 22nd collection, she again urges readers to look for “every moment’s miracle.” But in this book, the everyday language the 71-year-old is known for is just too unremarkable to evoke the extraordinary.

Instead of searching for fresh modes of expression—a poet’s imperative—Oliver relies on words that are so colloquial they bore. She’s “in love” with everything, including life. In one poem, she writes, “I have a wonderful life,” and in another she describes death as “you’re through.” In “Self Portrait,” she refers to herself as “full of beans.” She tends to repeat these unmemorable phrases.

The few times when Oliver gets it right, her metaphors are striking. In “Ocean” she writes about the sea “lifting her thousands of white hats.” In “Night Herons,” a bird’s beak is “a thin door” to death for the fish it eats. The collection’s last piece, “Eleven Versions of the Same Poem,” is by far the strongest, showing how nature mirrors human experience and making the reader unravel the poem’s mystery: “I am the pledge of emptiness that turned around.” It works because Oliver stops telling us what she loves or what we should love.

Often, though, Oliver brings her agenda to the fore. Invoking Emerson and Thoreau, she advocates returning to nature for our salvation. In one poem she mentions “governmental agencies hungry for money” and in yet another she ends with “the terrible debris of progress.” Oliver isn’t the first polemical poet, and unfortunately not the first to let the politics trump the poetics.

Oliver reads Wednesday 2.