finding mary oliver

This weekend, a New York Times travel piece wanders Provincetown, Mass., in the footsteps of poet Mary Oliver.

Oliver, who has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, writes nature poetry, which in lesser hands than hers I sometimes call "sparrow poetry." She was influenced in her work by other great nature poets, Whitman, Thoreau and Millay (in whose home, Steepletop, she briefly lived while a teen, after Millay's death; she helped the family sort through Millay's papers).

But while Oliver writes about nature, her poems are conversations with life, more about truths than imagery itself. I find that lots of poets today can't make that distinction; they seem to write earth imagery because it sounds poetic, not because it speaks truth.

Though Oliver is still living, still in Provincetown with her partner, she declined to be interviewed for the NYT piece; she wanted her work to speak for itself. It does.