A Brief Book Review of Dream Work by Mary Oliver
If I have before read the poetry of Mary Oliver (1935-2019), I don’t recall it. In this book of 45 poems, Dream Work (1986), I found a few worth remembering. Her often vivid language guides the way. In “The River”, we glimpse the “blue lung of the Caribbean”; in “Sunrise”, we awaken to “the familiar fabric of the dawn”; in “The Shark”, we meet “darkness you can’t imagine”; and in “The Waves” we learn “The sea isn’t a place but a fact, and a mystery under its green and black cobbled coat that never stops moving”.
I bought two books of Oliver’s poetry recently. While Dream Work didn’t strike a chord in me as strongly as poems by Yusef Komunyakaa and Claudia Rankine or the haikus of Richard Wright, whose works I read recently, I look forward to reading more of Oliver’s catalog. She has an appealing ability at describing, and persuading you of, the beauty and spiritual vitality at the heart of the natural world.