American Primitive

Rating:
Summary: Exquisite.
Review: "American Primitive" is among the finest books of poetry written by an American author in the last 25 years. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it is a precise and lucid notation of the natural world. Oliver does not shun away from the severe brutality of every day yet does not paint the beauty of nature's cycle with any diminishment. It has undoubtedly influenced my own writing and is a book I return to to find some sort of truth in accounting for the way things are

Rating:
Summary: American Primitive
Review: A wonderful book that moves me everytime I read it. It is a book that explores the natural world and how nature merges with our own internal landscapes. An important book!

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: Beautiful. A great place to start if a reader has not read Oliver before. Not to be missed.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: I was really impressed by "American Primitive," the collection of poems by Mary Oliver. I knew that this book was special when I got to the third poem, "The Kitten." This poem about a stillborn kitten stopped me dead in my tracks. Painful yet beautiful, tragic yet transcendent, it sets a powerful tone for the collection as a whole.

And "American Primitive" does indeed strike me as a unified whole. It consists mostly of poems about American wildlife, with some poems that touch on people in United States history. The poems are often about the cycles of life, including birth, death, and loss. In some poems eating becomes a transcendent act that points to the connectedness of all life.

Oliver writes about mushrooms, blackberries, crows, egrets, deer, snakes, whales, and other living things. She also writes about such natural phenomena as snow and sunlight. Her language is often striking and sensuous. I love the lines from "Spring" where she says "The rain / rubs its shining hands all over me." With her attentiveness to the natural world, Oliver reminded me somewhat of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but she really has a voice and vision all her own in "American Primitive."

Rating:
Summary: The master
Review: Oliver writes about natural objects that we all know and yet provides a unique look at them. Her voice is all her own, and that voice will inspire poets for years to come. She is the master.

From the author of The Difference Now, A New Dish, and At the Coffee Shop.


Rating:
Summary: This Pulitzer Prize winner humbles me.
Review: This book humbles me. I have been writing poetry for many years, and I'm an avid reader of poetry. I am amazed by the level and awareness Mary Oliver brings to the surface of human experience. This book is as much of a poet's book as it is for "anybody" willing to enrich their lives with poetry. Mary Oliver is a wise poet, if I dare use that term, for the modern world. It's easy to see why this book won the Pulitzer! Hail to the Pulitzer Prize judges who awarded Mary Oliver's American Primitive their award. It was one of their best choices.

Rating:
Summary: A Cultural Icon (...which doesn't bode well for our culture)
Review: Three Tenors, Riverdance, Deepak Chopra... Add Mary Oliver to the list of contemporary swill that bloats our self-indulgent and self-important mass culture. The current fad in poetry has been to take care not to make the real, "too real" (and therefore disturbing to most consumers). But to drape it in a gauzy romanticism, making the truths that exist in this world harmless and safe for consumption by an audience who want nothing more than to continue in a sheltered belief of a gentle anthropomorphic world.
The fact that this received a Pulitzer says less about the work and more about the sheer lack of discerning taste on the part of the Pulitzer committee.

Rating:
Summary: A True Classic of Contemporary Poetry
Review: To read any poem by Mary Oliver is to be in the presence of the exquisite potential of language for marrying beauty and wisdom. Rarely a poet, so inclined not to impose her view nor her beliefs on anyone, can leave such profound impression on how we may come to see the world. And to read -to live, really- each poem of "American Primitive" is to educate your heart.
Someone said, very appropriately so, that Oliver's poems may have the less humans in them than any contemporary poet's body of work, yet in the case of this magnificent book, two of its most stunning choices -"John Chapman" and "The Lost Children"- has Oliver bring the same keen compassion and awe for the tragic and the gracious in being our kind, that she does when speaking of foxes, mushrooms, or crows and owls.
"John Chapman," for instance, contains some of the wisest lines about being one of us, humans, that you will find in American poetry. Chapman was the real John Appleseed who "thought little, / on a rainy night, / of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching / flesh with any creatures there" and, yet, as a woman in the poems recalls "he spoke / only once of women and his gray eyes / brittled into ice. "Some / are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt / the pain of it, remembered it / into her old age."
I wonder if Oliver chose him because he lived his life during those times when this country was learning to be this country -and perhaps because of it- we were, for the last time, as close as a species to the rest of nature as we ever had.
"The Lost Children" is also about those times too, yet about those of one kind taken by those who were the natives to this land. It is an amazing feat of truth and empathy, as much as proof of Oliver's mastery of the poem's form and mood as in her capacity to imagine how the disappearance of these children could be as much a calling to another wondrous life and such grief and emptiness to those who will not see them anymore, at the same time.
Given the size limitations stipulated for these reviews, I'm not able to comment in the rest of these poems in the way their stunning depth and beauty deserve. The book's title -American Primitive- reaches a particular poignancy, for me, with every reading, "primitive" means essential, original, a natural and fierce morality.
As she says so certainly "To live in this world / you must be able / to do three things: / to love what is mortal; / to hold it / against your bones knowing / your own life depends on it; / and, when the time comes to let it go, / to let it go.

Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: Very powerful use of language,...in a subtle way. The use of image-metaphor to our state of "being" is awesome. Mary Oliver is a brilliant author. This book is very well crafted and the control of language gives to the passion to the world around us. A wonderful compliment to ourselves and the planet we live upon.