Ken's Reviews > Upstream: Selected Essays

It's been a long time since I read a book in one sitting, but conditions were just right yesterday: a 175-page book with good-sized font, a sympathetic author, a dock on a Maine lake with high wind and whitecaps (always the best reading venue).

I was expecting more about poetry but am happy to report that there's more about nature. I'm also happy to report that it's not JUST nature MO goes on and on about. Some essay collections are one-note Sally's, but this nicely mixed Annie Dillard-style nature pieces with essays on writers Oliver loves such as Ralph, Waldo, and Emerson (a literary firm from Concord, MA), Edgar, Allan, and Poe (ditto from a Baltimore gutter, alas), and Walt NMN Whitman. Throw in Wordsworth from Jolly Olde and you have four heavyweights for MO to analyze at her leisure and yours.

In the Poe essay, there's a brief riff on love and death, two human preoccupations (well, full-time occupation once you're dead and your loving capabilities have left you):

"In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view time's shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poe's narrators. We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. This is Poe's real story. As it is ours. And this is why we honor him, why we are fascinated far past the simple narratives. He writes about our own inescapable destiny."

Interesting that I liked that bit, as I don't much care for Poe's over-the-top writing (his poetry especially leaves me muttering, "Nevermore"). Still, it's an interesting theory with a few nice turns of phrases. Enough to keep you going while the wind turns your pages on the dock of a Maine lake.

And hats off. Oliver is one of those rare writers who can do two genres well. Granted, not all of her poetry holds up, but enough of it does to make her matter. And these essays matter, too. The final piece on Provincetown's lost way of life will strike a chord. We all know a place we've been robbed of by time and change, the Bonnie & Clyde of our rapidly accelerating (and declining) times.