Dream Work, Mary Oliver. Atlantic Monthly Press (ISBN: 9780871130693) 1986.
Summary: Poetry of Mary Oliver running the gamut from dogfish to Dachau, from starfish to Orion, and Robert Schumann to Stanley Kunitz.
It seemed fitting to read a collection of the poetry of Mary Oliver in the month of her birth. Dream Work follows Oliver’s Pulitzer winning American Primitive. Like much of her writing, Oliver’s poetry moves from the commonplaces of the natural world like dogfish, geese, starfish, and marsh hawks to remind us of the transcendent, our evanescent existence and the existential questions that endure.
She juxtaposes tiny dogfish with a cri de coeur “to know / whoever I was, I was / alive / for a little while.” She sees the rising sun over a pond of blazing lilies as “a prayer heard and answered / lavishly, / every morning”. Wild trilliums on the hillside contrast with the lack of tenderness of childhood’s ambiguities and the difficult years.
“Dreams” captures the “Dream Work” of this collection’s title. Dreams are likened to budding flowers with a letter at the center of each that eludes the waking self. “Whispers” describes the elusive “heaven of sensation” from which she finds herself held back. Then in “Members of the Tribe” she lists artists, her tribe, who lived between madness and genius. Yet it is not their unhappiness she cannot forgive but the “hurtling / toward oblivion / on the sharp blades of their exquisite poems, saying: / this is the way.“
“Robert Schumann” exemplifies madness in art, thought of by her every day in his lifelong struggle with madness. Yet there was the brief moment when Clara first came into his life. Because of this poem, I had to look up the story of Schumann, who composed brilliantly between fits of madness. On the other hand, there is “Stanley Kunitz.” Likening his work to a beautiful garden effortlessly blossoming, she now understands the toils behind the beauty.
However, it is often the commonplace that speaks most deeply. For example, in “Landscape” she listens each morning to the mosses and the black oaks around her pond. If she closes her heart to them, she is “as good as dead.” Or an approach of a thunderstorm reminds her of how the normalcy of life may be shattered in an instant.
Some of the poetry is darker. For instance “Rage” describes the sexual abuse of a child in chilling terms (Oliver suffered sexual abuse as a child). In a poem written on the fortieth anniversary of the revealing of the German camps, she struggles with the incongruity of forest scenes, mountains of bodies and Mengele enjoying a gourmet meal.
Yet she cannot end here. Rather, the collection concludes with “The Sunflowers” that invite us into the fields to listen to their stories. Amid ugly realities, Oliver points us to a deeper magic. She cannot always find the words. But there is something to be heard.