![]() ![]() If she had to die in this hour and for this enterprise, she would, without hesitation. ![]() ![]() The eyes, though they throw small light, are deeply alive and watchful. She seeks refuge in the forests that fringe the ocean, for her a kind of secular chapel, where she discovers the marvel of nature renewing itself, as in this scene of a turtle burrowing a nest for her eggs: “She sees me, and does not move. Townspeople come and go, cheery visitors in her daily routine, and Oliver isn’t averse to them, but she craves her solitude. ![]() A sense of elegy hovers over these essays, most of them less than 10 pages long, as Oliver mourns the passing of a fishing community into a tourist destination. In her seminal essay on the 1960s, “The White Album,” Joan Didion captures that tumultuous decade in a single declarative sentence: “So many encounters in those years were devoid of any logic save that of the dreamwork.” A similar ineffability pervades “Upstream,” a very different collection of selected essays from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, whose quiet woods and ponds on Cape Cod are as indelible as Didion’s psychedelic California, attesting to a common faith in the yin and yang of dreams and consciousness, of forging one’s path through the torque and tangle of the world.įor five decades Oliver lived in Provincetown, Mass., long before it became a bohemian haven and an LGBT mecca. ![]()
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