Review: Dog Songs

Dog Songs by Mary Oliver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So far as I can tell – and there are substantial limits to what I can see – Mary Oliver is the greatest living American poet. She is the heir to what I think of as the Midwestern school of poetry: Theodore Roethke out of Michigan and James Wright (like her) out of Ohio. There’s a lot to admire in the confessionals like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath, and there are countless poets who make me go “wow” when I find just the right piece by them (like Robert Hass or Ed Hirsch), but I admire the Roethke-Wright-Oliver strain most of all, and here she is, still producing.

When Oliver is at her most ambitious, she’s exactly what all great poets have been: the most precise mouthpieces we have for questioning who we are in the universe. Some of her later work has been staggering in the simple ways it asks the deepest questions. I haven’t read all of her late collections, but I have read in all of them, and she has a clarity of vision like no one else. She is one of our great religious poets, yet she rarely discusses religion. She is one of our great nature poets, yet her work always comes back to asking us who we are in the middle of nature.

This collection is not her most ambitious, but it’s littered with beautiful poems. When I picked it up at a bookstore on vacation, I assumed it was her sellout, her chance to cash in on having one of the biggest names in poetry. It is that, to a tiny degree, but it’s also evidence that even when she allows herself to indulge in sentimentality, she is far more than sentimental. In fact, fleetingly, she is at her best.

The idea here is that each of these poems is about dogs. Many (including many of the weaker ones from the second half here) are about specific pets she’s had and lost. In a lesser writer’s hands – and, as I see it, just about everyone is a lesser writer – that would feel like an indulgence. In hers, it builds towards a sense of dogs as opening us to the natural world. The dogs she has known and loved have come into her home and allowed her to domesticate them, but, in turn, they have provides her a seasoning of the uncontrolled, of wildness.

As she puts it directly in the long prose poem/essay, “Dog Talk,” that concludes the collection, “I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.”

At its best, that means we get pieces of poems like this from “Luke’s Junkyard Dream.” The poem recounts the world as it opened up to one of her dogs, born in a junkyard and infected with worms. As it concludes, though, he discovers the possibility of a greater beauty. “Listen, a junkyard puppy/ learns quickly how to dream./ Listen, whatever you see and love --/ that’s where you are.”

Or there’s a selection from “Her Grave,” a meditation on the burial spot of one of her beloved pets. “A dog can never tell you what she knows from the/ smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know/ almost nothing.”

And, echoing that sense that we have much to learn of the wild from these dogs we take into our lives, there’s this from “Holding Onto Benjamin,” “No use to tell him/ that he/ and the raccoon are brothers./ You have your soft ideas about nature/ he has others,/ and they are full of his/ white teeth/ and lip that curls sometimes,/ horribly/…And it’s his eyes, not yours,/ that are clear and bright.”

Those are among the best of the collection, but even some of the ones that work less well have their redemptive moments. I found myself tiring of one of the later prose poems, “You Never Know Where a Conversation is Going to Go,” and then there came its conclusion: “Every time you wake up and/ love your life and the world, you’re/ praying, my dear boy. I’m sure of it.”

If you’re interested in Oliver’s work in general, start somewhere else. If you have ever tried to explain to someone what it means to love a dog, though, this might be exactly the collection of poetry you were looking for without knowing it.


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