Mary Oliver at her didactic best - which means she teaches us without trying to, what we learn being a by-product of what her poems do to us, in us and for us.
"It is salvation if one can step forth from the
clutter of one's mind into that open space --
that almost holy space -- called work.
I suppose only a poet would talk about work like that? Or at least someone for whom work results in the expression of the self in creation towards communication. The fashioning of meaning, ideas and image from words, touching the inner lives of others through the shared currency of a vocabulary congruent with experience, discourse with a shared language though perhaps different accents, these are indeed gestures towards holiness.
And then these lines -
Lord, there are so many fires, so many words, in
my heart. It's going to take something I can't
even imagine, to put them all out.
As a writer, a theologian, and a teacher, I recognise in these lines that same gesture towards holiness. The sacred source of ideas, meaning, and the words that enable one mind to share with another some of those fires, lies somewhere between the intellect, the heart and the will. She is describing something deeply and definitively human.
(From Swan. Poems and Prose Poems, Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, 2010, page 52.)
Comments