Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Somebody had the bright idea of collecting Mary Oliver's bird poems, and voila! Owls and Other Fantasies was born. 16 out of 25 poems (i.e. about a third of the book) came from earlier books, as did 1 of the 2 essays. The book is obviously targeted at birders and Mary Oliver's fans; its commercial considerations overshadow whatever aesthetic merit it has. The verse is best described as pandering. Its questions are obvious, its spirituality is tinselly, its consolations cheap. The first poem of the book begins: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.  I want to shout back, "But I want to be good! I want to walk on my knees through the desert! Who are you to tell me that I don't have to?" Certainly not someone who tempts me with such an easy way out as "the world offers itself to your imagination." T...

Ashtrays as Big as Hubcaps In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open. A woman knelt there, washing something in the white bowl. —Mary Oliver, “Singapore” That woman scrubbing the big ashtrays with a blue rag, she was my mother. Her hands were not moving like a river. He dark hair was not like the wing of a bird, it was wispy. When she smiled at you, she was not feeling embarrassed. She knew the toilet bowl was a good place for the ashtrays but guessed the work argued with your wobbly stomach. You flew home and put her in a poem called “Singapore.” I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life , you wrote, I want her to rise up from the slop and fly down to the river. She becomes, for you and your American fans, a picture of the light that can shine out of a life , meaning, a saint, and the picture is completed, roundly, with trees and birds. She bused home and said nothing, for you were forgotten in her rush to stick the laundry out of the window to...