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What Mary Oliver’s Critics Don’t Understand | The New Yorker

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From 2017: For America’s most beloved poet, Ruth Franklin writes, paying attention to nature is a springboard to the sacred.

Save this story Save this story “Mary Oliver is saving my life,” Paul Chowder, the title character of Nicholson Baker’s novel “ The Anthologist ,” scrawls in the margins of Oliver’s “ New and Selected Poems, Volume One .” A struggling poet, Chowder is suffering from a severe case of writer’s block. His girlfriend, with whom he’s lived for eight years, has just left him, ostensibly because he has been unable to write the long-overdue introduction to a poetry anthology that he has been putting together. For solace and inspiration, he turns to poets who have been his touchstones—Louise Bogan, The

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