![]() ![]() “With them I live my life, with them I enter the event, mold the meditation” (20). “I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them,” she explains. Oliver catalogues this inspirational chorus of voices in her indispensible little book Winter Hours. How literature might offer an invitation to redefine the margins of life is a question at the heart of the intellectual tradition to which Oliver is heir. “Look, and look again,” she writes in the poem “To Begin with, the Sweet Grass,” “This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes” ( Evidence 37). ![]() And yet, as Oliver has long maintained, the weight of ignorance, limitation, and loss does not fix the margins of a human life. Midway through her most recent collection, Swan, Mary Oliver admits that we are “not wise, and not very often / kind,” and that “much can never be redeemed” (42). ![]()
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