her words are arrows…

Book review:

Evidence

by Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

Boston: Beacon Press, 2009

74 pages

Guilty, guilty, guilty. With Evidence, Mary Oliver is guilty once again of nailing me to the floor so I can read every single poem in her book, one after the other.

Her style encourages me to think that I can write more and better poetry, because she makes it seem so easy to choose the right words, in the right order. Mary speaks straight from her heart, she uses exacting words as arrows to find precise targets in vision and imagination, and she leaves out all the other stuff.

Despite the mountain of her years, we have Evidence: Mary Oliver climbed to the highest branches. Here’s an excerpt from “About Angels and About Trees”:

“…what I know is that

they rest, sometimes,

in the tops of the trees

and you can see them,

or almost see them,

or, anyway, think: what a

wonderful idea…

The trees, anyway, are

miraculous, full of

angels…and certainly

ready to be

the resting place of

strange, winged creatures

that we, in this world, have loved.”

* * * * * *

“Boil up” and other good manners…

The “Hobo Ethical Code” is worth a quick read.

click here

Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”