December 8: Winding River, Good Read, "American Primitive," New Cartoon

They walked along the road; Scrooge recognizing every gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town appeared in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river.  Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in country gigs and carts, driven by farmers.  All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it.

This little scene from Stave Two of A Christmas Carol is straight out of a Currier and Ives print.  In fact, Currier and Ives owes a lot to Charles Dickens, who pretty much created the whole stereotypical snowy, idyllic Christmas landscape described in this passage.  Weather and nature play an important role in the book, indicating happiness or sorrow, mirth or dearth.

Mary Oliver, the author of American Primitive, writes about nature.  In fact, most of the poems in this  collection bear titles indicating the importance of the natural world to Oliver's work:  "Mushrooms," "Egrets," "A Poem for the Blue Heron," "Rain in Ohio," "Skunk Cabbage," "Blackberries," "The Sea," "In Blackwater Woods."  Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for this collection, and it epitomizes everything that is great about her poems.

Oliver works through nature to touch upon greater questions of survival and spirituality and silence and love.  She uses an eye that, at once, sees the minutiae of foxes and herons and dark spiders, as well as the cosmic of landscape and weather and space.  In the poem "Flying," Oliver writes,

...
you stare like an animal into
the blinding clouds
with the snapped chain of your life,
the life you know:
the deeply affectionate earth,
the familiar landscapes
slowly turning
thousands of feet below.

Oliver revels in the rich, fecund life of swamp and sea and forest.  And through that rich life, she's able to excavate the even more fertile spaces of the heart and soul.  She's an American primitive and and American treasure.

Reading Mary Oliver makes Saint Marty want to give up poetry, because he will never approach the perfection of poems like this one:

First Snow

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into the night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things;
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect.
and nightly turn from.  Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain--not a single
answer has been found--
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

Confessions of Saint Marty