I love the gentle nature of her poetry, with flashes of savagery – quite at one with nature itself. This is one of the first poems of Mary Oliver’s I came across and it spoke to me in a way that only poems can – it got right to the core of things. If you liked this post, why not try Rose Cook’s ‘Poem for someone who is juggling her life’ or Denise Levertov’s ‘The Secret’ Her poem is a life lesson I can never learn too often. At that point Malcolm’s piece stops he lets Mary Oliver do the talking instead. Paxman concluded the programme with this reflection, that there was important terrain for us to explore between “external validation and internal validation”: ‘a matter in essence, of finding yourself, beyond other people’s expectations’ as Malcolm so eloquently put it. From the sound of it, this is what Jeremy Paxman went through as well.
Not least among the pleasures of reading Malcolm’s piece, therefore, was the physical sensation of feeling my preconceived ideas about Brand being turned on their head. He confessed to making the same mistake himself, thinking he was phoning up Manuel from Fawlty Towers, not somebody’s grandfather. Brand stated that there are two Russell Brands, the one people go to see and hear, expecting something miraculous, and the idiot who makes prank phone calls. I never saw the programme in question but feel as though I have. I loved Malcolm’s telling of the story of Russell Brand grilling on Newsnight, in the wake of the fallout from his prank call, with Jonathan Ross, to Andrew Sachs. Until I found this marvellous blog post by my old friend Malcolm Doney I had kind of felt Oliver’s searching and tough-delicate poems kind of bouncing off me a little. Now, I realise, as with my discovery of Billy Collins, that I was pretty much the last person I know to come to this particular party.
This is no less true of my discovery, some three or so years ago, of Mary Oliver’s poetry. From friends, fellow poets and teachers, to sitting in a car park waiting for a poetry workshop, or driving to one, I feel the luckiest of people to have had such great mentors.
If there is one theme I keep going back to in these Lifesaving Poems posts, it is this: behind every discovery of every single poem in the list there is a person who nudged it forward, often directly, sometimes invisibly, frequently without knowing it, towards me.
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