What is there to say about Mary Oliver that hasn’t been said already? Most of all, we’re grateful to have another book with her reverence for the things and moments of the everyday. Nothing in this volume is newly discovered; it is the gathering of older work together between two covers that is new. Still, Little Alleluias is for wandering the world with a great spiritual writer — she died in 2019 — to help see life as full of opportunities for attention, gratitude, and wonder.
The book gathers together three short works from Oliver’s mid-career: The Leaf and the Cloud, a tiny collection of seven interconnecting, longer, multi-stanza poems; What Do We Know, another short collection of poems and prose poems; and Long Life, which is about half the total pages here, short essays with a dozen poems mixed in.
The editor of the volume refers to the collection on the Acknowledgments page as “a midlife masterpiece” of Mary Oliver. We agree, with thanks to the creative group of editors, publishers, and Mojave poet Natalie Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, who brought these poems and essays back to life, or in the case of Diaz, wrote an interesting Foreword.
It is good to be reminded of Mary Oliver’s earlier work. It’s so often that we encounter her famous poems from late career including “Wild Geese” and “When Death Comes.” Those are almost ubiquitous. But lines of the earlier “Riprap” — such as “The sweet-faced cat, / the good goat, / the golden feet of the hen— / the sealed jug of her egg” — remind us of Oliver’s way of paying attention, and sharing what she sees. The same poem, later, reads “still I’m looking at everything— / in the wide morning and the strike of noon / I’m humming, and clapping my hands, / and I can’t stop.” With Oliver, we too practice attention.
She always has profound respect for the human search for the sacred. In a short essay on William Wordsworth and beauty, she writes: “Nothing outside ourselves makes us desire to [seek beauty]; the questions, and the striving toward answers, come from within.”
And she doesn’t shy away from what hurts. One poem in this work could become a new classic — ubiquitous like “Wild Geese.” “Beauty” is a sustained reflection on the shimmering and fearsome beauty of an owl as she soars, plunges, and causes a poet to write about her like a psalmist on a fearsome angel, or a mystic on the darkness of God. By poem’s end, the powerful beak that easily snaps life from small animals is called “the most terrible cup / I will ever enter.”
