by Mary Oliver
Beacon Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
Another Year, Another Mary Oliver Book
It would be easy to dismiss this as yet another cog on the massive machine that is Oliver, author of the current top-selling book of poetry in the U.S. (who clocks in elsewhere on the chart at numbers four, nine, ten, eleven, twenty-one, and thirty). It would be simpler to just brush Thirst off as more dazzled ruminations about light, peonies, and the pleasures of waking early in the morning to watch some specific genus of snake do something mildly interesting.
But what separates this book is the anguish she exhibits over the death of her longtime partner, Molly Malone Cook, who graces yet again Oliver’s dedication page. Cook died in 2005 and Oliver spends a good chunk of Thirst addressing a higher power in a struggle to repress anger at this death. The trouble is, the elegiac poems mostly come across as wounded; they grind this anger with awfully forced resolutions.
Thirst also offers a more fiercely Christian Oliver, who turns to God in nearly every poem and relegates the wonderment she used to offer dogfish to the consecration of bread and wine:
They are something else now
from what they were
before this began.
So is Oliver. Perhaps the cynicism of the poem title “The Poet Reflects on Yet Another Spring” says it all; she seems a little affected here, and it results in some rather shrewd, reactionary didacticism: “Everything is His.”
There is some redemption, particularly in the title poem, which is also the last in the book. Historically Oliver’s best work—particularly in the Pulitzer-winning American Primitive—was fixed in an inspired medium between suffering and transcendence, but her work in the last ten years or so has been too consistent a didactic celebration. In the finale, however, she seems reminded that death and suffering beget confusion, a loss of stasis, and that these proffer the most genuine urge to bow before beauty: “I am slowly learning.”
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