maybe Mary knows a lot of stuff…

Book review:

Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

New York: Penguin Press, 2016

I’m allowed to say this: I like Mary Oliver’s poetry a whole lot more than I like her essays.

Upstream just seems like a long, lonely walk against the current, even if the stream is a lovely thing in a secret bosky place where being cheek-to-cheek with a turtle may not seem like a completely bad idea.

Oliver loves the narrative style, and she’s happy with much more attention to the details of Nature than I’m able to tolerate.

Her reflections about Hawthorne, and Poe, and Emerson, and Whitman may be spectacularly well informed, and they may be insightful, but I don’t know enough to judge and I do know enough to suspect that no one really knows in great detail what was going on in, for instance, Whitman’s mind when he was endlessly composing and publishing Leaves of Grass. Maybe Oliver somehow knows…good for her if she does. I suspect that she was writing what she wanted to believe.

I’ll stick to reading what I want to read.

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Book review: The Bridges of Madison County

If you’re looking for

highly stoked eroticism

and high-rolling lives

that throw off sparks when they touch,

look elsewhere.

by Robert Waller

click here

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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse 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”