Thirst Book

I had not yet read this later collection, and decided to read it because its author, Mary Oliver, recently died, which led for me to a kind of grieving. This book was written more than ten years ago after her long time partner, Molly Malone Clark, died, so I thought it might provide some interesting (and useful) symmetry: How can those of us readers best mourn Oliver's (or anyone's) loss? Oliver was one of the best known poets of the last fifty years; she's one of our greatest advocates for poetry and living the poetic life, the life of language, of close observation of daily life, of nature and the heart.

Oliver's principal theme here is how she is learning to live with grief. Both she and Clark were private people, so this collection is less about Clark or her relationship with her partner of more than forty years than about how to deal with her loss. But the revelation in this book is that the woman whose ecstatic spirituality we have for decades associated most closely with nature now turns more explicitly than ever before in her poetry to her Christian faith. Nature is still a source of sustenance, but she makes it clear now that she sees the natural world through her faith. Most of the simple poems here I like less than earlier collections, but some of them are still remarkable.

In "On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate," one of the best poems here, she makes a meditation on the 145th Psalm, working her way through bewilderment and anguish back to belief. But it's less about the "hope of heaven" than to enter "the other kingdom: grace, and imagination, / and the multiple sympathies." "My work is loving the world," Oliver tells us, in the very first line of this collection. This is what she has always done, but now she makes it clear that the work of loving that world is connected to her faith.

I also really liked "Gethsemane," which focuses on the sleeping guards outside Jesus's tomb:

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.

Probably the most cited/favorite poem from this collection is this one:

The Uses of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

But here's another on the uses of grief:

Heavy

That time
I thought I could not
Go any closer to grief
Without dying
I went closer
And I did not die.
Surely God
Has his hand in this.

If you want to know more about Mary Oliver and read some more of her poetry, this is her at the Poetry Foundation site: