In my Bachelor degree back in the late 1970's, I found myself often surprised by literature. I mean, of course, writers and poets and playwrights about whom I knew very little and whose talents leapt out at me like so many revelations. There had been an inkling of this interest in later high school, when I was bemused at being the first to complete Wuthering Heights in my English class. I took to John Keats too, his verse like an exotic drug to my humdrum middle class existence.

There is a lot of reading to be done in an undergraduate arts degree and I tried to do most of it, leading me in many delightful directions. Old and much-read books keep circling back on me and it was while reading a few pages of Leaves of Grass that I heard about the passing of Mary Oliver. Whitman was but one of her influences (she counted Emerson and Shelley too). Her verse is a raw immersion in the natural world - a sense of the transcendent - of being part of and yet apart, is apparent, elevated, you might say, in a way that is rare in the modern era. The truth is, Oliver pays attention and she walked and walked in her native Ohio and then in New England. That immersion is available to everyone should they seek it - the settling of the mind, a rising clarity.

She was a good poet too, as this short piece, August, reminds us.


When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.