Goldenrod—Mary Oliver

At a yard sale, my wife picked up New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver. I had heard of Oliver but hadn’t read much of her work. At some point between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I started reading. 

Oliver is quickly becoming a favorite poet. She is known for simple imagery, plain speaking, and a focus on nature. There is a kind of self-evident beauty throughout the poems I’ve read so far, and I appreciate how accessible they are.  This is in contrast to James Wright’s Collected Poems, which I just finished. Wright wades into surrealism and, while his poems are also full of rich and beautiful moments, I doubt I’ve understood two of them.

“Goldenrod” is a poem that immediately resonated with me, especially the last stanza. Read the poem here: https://www.cathybaker.org/poetic-pause-goldenrod-mary-oliver/. Goldenrod uses a format I’ve seen in a number of Oliver’s poems already: a series of quatrains (four line stanzas) where each line is indented further than the previous one. Here’s the first two stanzas of “Goldenrod” as an example:

On roadsides,
  in fall fields,
      in rumpy bunches,
          saffron and orange and pale gold, 

in little towers,
  soft as mash,
      sneeze-bringers and seed-bearers,
          full of bees sand yellow beads and perfect flowerlets

This poem is just over a page and definitely worth a minute or two to read. Best of all, Oliver’s straight forward style can be enjoyed without suffering the poetic hangover caused by headier poets 😆