SOURCE: "Six Poets in Search of a History," in Poetry, Vol. 150, No. 2, May, 1987, pp. 113-16.

Gilbert is an American editor, educator, and critic. In the following review, she applauds Oliver for mining the natural world to "learn the lessons of survival."

Compared to [Gail] Mazur's work, Mary Oliver's poems are deliberately impersonal, almost anti-confessional. Yet she too is haunted by history, by the private history of the oppressive father who is the subject of "Rage" ("in your dreams you have sullied and murdered, / and dreams do not lie") and by the public history of the holocaust that is the subject of "1945–1985: Poem for the Anniversary," the history of Germany's "iron claw, which won't / ever be forgotten, which won't / ever be understood, but which did, / slowly, for years, scrape across Europe." Unlike the other poets in this group, however, Oliver finds a way to escape the rigors of human...