One Poetry Review by Peter Lattu

Reviewing Mary Oliver’s Red Bird

It’s winter here, cold with a biting wind chilling the skin. Snow showers are forecast. Mary Oliver’s new book Red Bird warms the spirit in such cold weather:

Red bird came all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else could.

Her dogs are back, Luke and Percy. Luke displays a wild, loving approach to life that Mary Oliver desires as well. Like Luke, Percy wants us to “Love, love, love”. Percy wants Mary Oliver to put down her books and go out with him to enjoy the natural world. In another poem, Percy shows her how to run forward into life.

Blackwater Pond makes an appearance in “Mornings at Blackwater”. Here, Mary Oliver revels in the discoveries that her morning walks bring her. They are a source of inspiration for her. She advises us to: “come to the pond… of your imagination… And live/your life.”

Even with Mary Oliver’s mostly upbeat look at life through nature, there is a downside, as in “Red”. It is a very sad poem about roadkill, Virginia gray fox roadkill. A mating pair of gray foxes were killed on the highway “while the cars kept coming”.

Mary Oliver touches deftly on some current political topics. She highlights global warming in a poem about polar bears. She bemoans the death of youth in war in “Iraq”. In “Of The Empire”, she concludes that our nation has a heart that is “small, and hard, and full of meanness”.

Still, Mary Oliver exhorts us to:

Pay attention
Be astonished
Tell about it

Pick up Red Bird and warm your soul.

{Review by Peter Lattu}