Mary Oliver’s Grass Roots Poetry

Dee Horne is a professor in the English Department at the University of Northern British Columbia.

Gratitudes – Introduction: Attending to the Anthropocene: Cultivating Attentiveness – Entering the Conversation: Mary Oliver’s Essays – Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Mary Oliver’s Ecotone Amid Nature Writing and Eco-Poetics – "The Gull Beat the Air with Its Good Wing" – "Such Unforced Love": Mary Oliver Re-thinks Domestication – Conclusion: The Overview – Index.

“Dee Horne’s insightful and instructive eco-critical commentary on the essays and poems of Mary Oliver first of all does what all outstanding literary scholarship does—Horne allows us to read and hear Oliver through the detailed and helpful intermediary language of interpretation. She lets us understand Oliver’s ‘paradoxical strategy’ of reconfiguring binary relations—mostly about humans and the natural world, but more than that—through an eco-poetics of ‘interrelat-edness’ that is both wonderful language art and at the same time important and immediately rel-evant thinking for our times. Horne’s work with Oliver here is careful, convincingly considered, and thoroughly researched and contextualized. Her sense of Oliver’s poetry as a kind of meta-phorical ecotone is just smart and right. But that is not enough to say about Horne’s work. This book matters. If we are in the midst of the Anthropocene, as I believe we are, we need Oliver, and we need Horne, to give us vocabulary and to situate us in place and in relationship with this planet. Horne sees Oliver’s work as ‘respectful, ethical, and cooperative.’ I agree, but I would add that Dee Horne’s commentary deserves the same praise and reconfigures those qualities into a constructive and militant scholarship—one that matters.”
Reuben J. Ellis, Professor of Writing, Woodbury University