Tag Archives: Mary Oliver

Nothing So Sensible as Sensual Inundation

By Robin Bates | Published: June 21, 2011

Poetry, with its eye on what really matters, can help us taste food again. Mary Oliver’s “Plum Trees” reminds us to eat with full awareness.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Plum Trees", Andrew Marvell, Food, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Sensuality, T. S. Eliot, To His Coy Mistress | Comments closed

I Weep for Adonais–He Is Dead

By Robin Bates | Published: April 7, 2011

When W. B. Yeat died on January 28, 1939, a despondent W. H. Auden wrote, “The day of his death was a dark cold day,” an instance of how we look to the weather for confirmation of our distress. The idea of a dying friend slipping away without leaving a trace is an unsettling one. Much better if the weather functions as a second witness, which it seems to do if it metaphorically expresses how we feel. When my good friend Alan Paskow died on Tuesday, I latched on to the fact that the day began with a tornado alert and that we were lashed by slashing rain for much of the morning.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Adonais, death and dying, elegy, Lost Children, Percy Shelley | Comments closed

Pretty Is Not What Blazes the Trail

By Robin Bates | Published: March 31, 2011

As the ice (or “iron rind”) starts dissolving from the ponds, we may dream of “ferns and flowers and new leaves unfolding.” But the transition from winter to spring is a much grittier affair, characterized less by sweetness and more by lurid smells emerging from chilling mud. The real harbinger of spring may not be the bluebird but the skunk cabbage, celebrated by Mary Oliver in a powerful poem.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Skunk Cabbage", "Spring", Nature | Comments closed

A Place of Parched and Broken Trees

By Robin Bates | Published: March 27, 2011

My friend Alan Paskow is finally dying. The poem that comes to mind is Mary Oliver’s “Universal Hospital, Boston.” All around nature is thriving, a contrast with the clean antiseptic rooms within the hospital. The contrast shows up as well in the patient’s eyes, which “are sometimes green and sometimes gray,/and sometimes full of humor, but often not.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "University Hospital Boston", death and dying | Comments closed

From Spiritual Hunger to Obesity Epidemic

By Robin Bates | Published: August 1, 2010

Spiritual Sunday My wife Julia has been telling me about a book that she’s reading, Geneen Roth’s Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything. The thesis of the book seems to be that overeating, like other compulsions and obsessions, is a means of escaping a spiritual emptiness. Or to put it another […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "When Death Comes", Dubliners, Emptiness, English Patient, Hunger, James Joyce, Michael Ondaatje, Nikos Kazantzakis, Religion, Spirituality, Zorba the Greek | Comments closed

Life Storming Out of the Darkness

By Robin Bates | Published: May 23, 2010

Spiritual Sunday Today Western Christians observe Pentecost, the day 50 days after Jesus’ resurrection and 10 days after his ascension into heaven. Pentecost celebrates the moment when the disciplines saw themselves surrounded by tongues of fire and felt lifted up by the Holy Spirit. In the Book of John (14:16) Jesus is reported to have promised the […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "May", Nature, Pentecost, Religion | Comments closed

Dazzled by Dreams of the Body

By Robin Bates | Published: May 2, 2010

Ten years ago my 21-year-old son died on the Sunday following Easter. The coupling of the tragedy with the celebration of Christ’s resurrection makes my questioning of the religious observance all the more acute. Do I really believe that Jesus rose from the dead? Is there life after the death of our bodies? Or if […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Humpbacks", death and dying, Nature, Whales | Comments closed

The Choice: To Die or to Go on Caring

By Robin Bates | Published: April 29, 2010

Yesterday we buried a long-time friend, 98-year-old Maurine Holbert Hogaboom, a New York actress who had retired to southern Maryland. Tomorrow we commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of my oldest son Justin. April, a month of new beginnings, has too often proved cruel as well. Nature often works ironically. Justin, feeling joyous on a […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Castaway", "John Chapman", death and dying, Herman Melville, Lost Children, Moby Dick, William Cowper | Comments closed

Stepping over Every Dark Thing

By Robin Bates | Published: April 28, 2010

If life seems hard at the moment, I have a poem that may lift you up: Mary Oliver’s “Egrets.” Oliver is, if not the most popular poet writing in America today, at least among the top five. Her poems often function as prayers to a divine spirit running through nature. In this way, she comes […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Egrets", Nature | Comments closed