SOURCE: A review of New and Selected Poems, in Poetry, Vol. 162, No. 4, July, 1993, pp. 233-42.

In the following review, Barber praises Oliver for her unique presence in contemporary poetry, but finds that New and Selected Poems fails to adequately show her growth as a poet.

With apologies to Susan Mitchell, no poet of our day has more of a claim on the title Rapture than Mary Oliver. Many poets seek communion with nature; Oliver courts ravishment by wildness. Many write in the persona of a solitary; Oliver's projected extremity of isolation approaches that of an anchorite. None can match the singlemindedness with which she depicts states of grace and abandon, and none traffics so unironically in the sublime. A Midwesterner long transplanted to New England's rocky coast, Oliver has assimilated no Yankee parsimony of utterance, and little of the flinty mindfulness that marks the Transcendentalist regard for leafy...