Evidence: Poems

Evidence is a collection of forty-seven poems by Mary Oliver, published by Beacon Press in 2009.

Its starting point is a couplet of Wordsworth's about the meanest flower giving thoughts that lie too deep for tears, and the book takes that seriously as a claim about how the world works rather than as a sentiment. What she is after is the evidence itself, offered daily and mostly unread: rivers and stones, willows, field corn, the mockingbird and its embellishments, the last hours of darkness before it gets light.

Written after Thirst, it holds grief and mortality alongside love and the natural world without pretending the first two can be resolved by the second. The spiritual concern that surfaced in the earlier book is still here, quieter and less pressed.

The language is completely unadorned, which is the achievement rather than the limitation. She had been writing for fifty years by this point and had stopped needing to reach for anything.