Red Bird: Poems
Birds are totem animals for poets, and Oliver writes of her winged kindred spirits often, here addressing “red bird” with gratitude for “firing up the landscape” in winter. Red bird is an emblem of passion in a frozen world, and a sign of Oliver’s own resurgence of love and hope after the profound grief of her last collection, Thirst (2006). In “Summer Morning,” she writes, “Heart, / I implore you, / it’s time to come back / from the dark.” And in “Self -Portrait,” she exclaims, “Ah! seventy. And still / in love with life. And still / full of beans.” One of few avidly read living poets, Oliver revels in the beauty of the living world, and takes to heart its lessons in patience and pleasure, cessation and renewal. As piercingly observant as ever in this substantial and forthright collection, Oliver is rhapsodic. But she is also wry, caustic, and elegiac in critiquing our habit of violence, “the debris of progress,” and the cruel fate of rivers, polar bears, and all the wild places and animals we’ve endangered, and from which we still have so much to learn. --Donna Seaman