SOURCE: "Polished Surfaces and Difficult Pastorals," in The New York Times Book Review, November 25, 1990, sec. 7, p. 24.

In the following excerpt, Richman reviews House of Light and finds it to be an optimistic work concerned with the cycles of life.

Mary Oliver's work seems to inhabit an aesthetic domain unsullied by the bustle of human life. Indeed, her principal theme—"how to love this world," as she writes in "Spring," a poem in her new volume, House of Light—often demands a poetic landscape that, brimming though it may be with lilies, herons, pipefish and crows, is devoid of human beings. Ms. Oliver would appear to think that if you take people as your subject, you will be forced to concentrate on their many hardships and misfortunes. Does she lack patience for such things? No: she's just not their poet.

When she does write about human suffering or nature's...