Starred review from August 15, 2008
"All summer I made friends/with the creatures nearby]." Oliver's latest volume offers new and previously collected poems, as well as two essays, celebrating all manner of critters and the worlds they inhabit. From the small, the curious, and the commonly overlookedgrasshoppers, snow crickets, and whelks, for exampleto the wild and intimidating, like coyotes, and, of course, the possibly mythical bear that haunts the Truro woods, the natural world is made more real and dangerous and, yet, inexplicably inviting in these poems. A prose piece tells about how "In a corner of the stairwell of this rented house a most astonishing adventure is going on," and accounts the details of a nesting spider; while a poem tells, not "about foolishness, /but about how I rose from the ground/and saw the world as if for the second time" after near-death by alligator. There is even a baker's dozen of poems about Percy, her dog, a lovable recurring character in her work. In all, this book is an affirmation: "everything, /even the great whale, /throbs with song." Recommended for all contemporary poetry collections.Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
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