Mary Oliver's poetry regards nature with a pioneer's wary eye. Not for her the enthusiasm, which often looks like hysteria these days, of the nature- can- dono- wrong school of thought, or the worship of natural forces by people who applaud the purity and balance of geological catastrophes, such as tidal waves and avalanches, while dismissing as corruption all valuable and even splendid human accomplishments, such as architecture. Oliver's poetry takes note of a natural murderousness. The lines report the slaughters to be found in any sylvan utopia. They limn a systematic violence. Her aptly horrific sketch of “the soft rope of a watermoccasin,” for instance, in “Death at a Great Distance,” shows it slipping into a tropical pool “where some bubbles / on the surface of that underworld announced / a fatal carelessness,” and where “death blurted out of that perfectly arranged mouth.” The idea of balance here is not ecology so much as a commonsensical honesty.

It is also that of a general solidity of aesthetic judgment. Oliver's poems demonstrate an awareness of themselves as art, acknowledging a drastic though often scanted difference between art and propaganda, to wit, that while art may affirm certain values, it cannot set about promoting them, no matter how excellent they may be, without at once surrendering its very lifeblood to dullness, clichés, and pomposity. Pompous finger- wagging is almost entirely missing from these two volumes. If their larger theme is a rural, natural world, with wolves, crows, bears, roses and ponds penned in vigorous portrait poems, their method is an innocence of exploration. All is clean air among these stanzas, and the innocence is that of a style refreshingly unstained by sleightof- hand messages to the reader, snobberies of doctrine and scurrilities of selfpity. When this works well, what we are given is the innocence of a mirror, one that apprehends nature while shrinking from eccentric distortion— what Schiller may have meant by the smartly naïve in art— and one that is devoid of the usual modernist and postmodernist contempt for the language of ordinary human beings.