[Mary Oliver is good in "No Voyage"] but predictably good; one could have foretold her form reading anthologies and the poetry magazines of the day. She never seems quite to be in her poems, as adroit as some of them are, but is always outside them, putting them together from the available literary elements. (p. 61)

One can see how the items sort of inform each other and make a comprehensible statement, but it is made at the cost of the imaginatively personal statement that might have occurred in its place; the page has been filled, instead, with the conventional and ordinary, and the real poem shut out. This is too bad, for Miss Oliver has a fine ear and a quick eye. She will do better. (p. 62)

James Dickey, "Of Human Concern," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1965 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission...