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In a collection of prose, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet ruminates joyfully on art and nature.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver should also be known for her prose: thoughtful, joyful and wise, always sparkling with characteristic energy. Upstream collects previously published essays and one new piece, skillfully grouped to chart a philosophical journey and “felt experience” much like that which she attributes to Walt Whitman.

Oliver revisits her childhood, and early instances of the sense of wonder so integral to her poetry, which she has often found in nature. The essay “My Friend Walt Whitman” speaks of a youthful and persistent literary affinity. Others explore natural places and creatures–spider, puppy, bear, bird–and the pleasures of artistic work. The middle of the collection contains slightly longer pieces of literary criticism–rediscovery of and praise for Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman and William Wordsworth. Poets and the natural world mingle as Oliver invokes Percy Bysshe Shelley while hunting for turtle eggs. Finally, the previously unpublished essay, “Provincetown,” honors the Massachusetts fishing town where Oliver lived for many years. Brief but redolent, this love letter to a place in the passage of time tends to look backward, as do several of the essays immediately preceding it, so that the collection moves toward retrospection.

Upstream serves as an excellent, accessible introduction to Oliver’s work, and despite its largely previously published contents, will satisfy her fans with its fresh arrangement and feeling of movement. These meditations are evocative, lovely and of course poetic, charming in small pieces and as a whole.

This review originally ran in the October 25, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: creative nonfiction, essays, nonfiction, Shelf Awareness |