Poetic identity
Oliver's poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England. Provincetown is the principal setting for her work after she moved there in the 1960s. Influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau, she is known for her clear and poignant observations of the natural world. According to the 1983 Chronology of American Literature, her collection American Primitive "presents a new kind of Romanticism that refuses to acknowledge boundaries between nature and the observing self." Nature stirred her creativity, and Oliver, an avid walker, often pursued inspiration on foot. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon, and humpback whales. In Long Life, she writes, "[I] go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything." She once said: "When things are going well, you know, the walk does not get rapid or get anywhere: I finally just stop and write. That's a successful walk!" She said she once found herself walking in the woods with no pen and later hid pencils in the trees so she would never be stuck like that again. Oliver often carried a 3-by-5-inch hand-sewn notebook for recording impressions and phrases. Maxine Kumin called her "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms." Oliver said her favorite poets were Walt Whitman, Rumi, Hafez, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.
Oliver was also compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues. Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release. Though criticized for writing poetry that assumes a close relationship between women and nature, she found that the self is only strengthened through immersion in the natural environment. Oliver is also known for her straightforward language and accessible themes. The Harvard Review describes her work as an antidote to "inattention and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives. She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making."
In America magazine, Lisa Ampleman wrote that Oliver's writing "became more and more spiritual" as she grew older. "For example, her latest book, a collection of selected poems, is titled Devotions. The New Yorker's Ruth Franklin notes that 'many poems here would not feel out of place in a religious service, albeit a rather unconventional one.'"
In a review of Oliver's 2006 collection Thirst, Fordham University professor Angela Alaimo O'Donnell wrote: "Often the poet approaches God, uncharacteristically, through more conventionally religious means: through the language of prayer and meditation, through engagement of liturgical ritual and through participation in sacrament. The presence of these elements marks a movement away from the nonspecific spirituality implicit in Oliver's previous work and toward a frank acknowledgment of faith that is decidedly Christian. The gifts the poet discovers as she endures this dark night of the soul are many, and chief among these is her faith. In a remarkable series of poems interspersed throughout the volume, she chronicles a process of awakening to God's loving presence through the reading of Scripture ("After Her Death"), through attending church and partaking of the Eucharist ("Coming to God: First Days", "The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church: The Eucharist") and through imaginative engagement of Christ's words and events in his life ("Six Recognitions of the Lord", "The Poet Thinks About the Donkey and Gethsemane"). In these latter two poems, Oliver explores spiritual and aesthetic terrain that is traditional and yet does so in a way that is characteristically her own."
Debra Dean Murphy wrote, "Although Oliver may have begun to treat theological themes more frequently and to use Christian language more explicitly, she remains true to what her work has always been about: pointing readers to the gift of presence—reminding us, in poems that are often deceptively simple, of what it means to attend to what is before us in any given moment. This is also the gift of wonder, of a posture of receptivity that Christians sometimes speak of as ... the calling to live more fully into our humanity as persons bearing the imago dei, to mirror the divine dance of mutual presence, mutual receptivity, mutual love.
