SOURCE: A review of American Primitive, in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 59, No. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 108-112.

Wright is an American poet and educator. In the following review, she finds in Oliver's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection both stunningly original and cliched elements.

This sixth volume of poetry by Mary Oliver is deceptively facile in its control of the language of the contemporary free-verse pastoral lyric. The book is often breathtaking—both in its luminous apparent simplicity (in the most successful poems), and in its seemingly narrow avoidance of triteness or flatness at times, especially in the final lines of the dozen or so weaker pieces. Some readers may object to the ordinariness of some poems here: haven't we all read too much of the conventional imagery and sentiments inspired by "Spring" or "May" or "The Roses"? And yet other poems—"Mushrooms," "The Kitten," "An Old Whorehouse," "John Chapman"—are stunning in the...