Among her peers and colleagues, Mary Oliver has earned distinction in her singular pursuit of representing the human experience. This may sound like a platitude, but in fact Oliver possesses a unique ability to draw her readers past borders and divisions and even identities. She draws back the context of an experience in order to lay out the actual experience in a vulnerable way, allowing her reader to engage viscerally with lifetimes beyond their own.
Oliver takes a humanitarian stance in much of her poetry. Texts like "Every Morning" illustrate a profound grief over the destruction caused by war. While neglecting any mention of environmental repercussions, she focuses entirely upon the people. Their faces become etched into Oliver's own, in a vicarious but mostly curious reflection. Then again in "August" she describes the horror of impending death in terms of laughter and sunshine and family. Approaching solace, she offers little in the way of consolation because she asserts a preference for honesty. She tells the story of her neighbor as Oliver herself experienced it, thus allowing the reader to process alongside.
As far as technique applies, Oliver explores the limits of printed letters on a page in communicating tone and feeling. The brief and gradually ebbing lines of "Beside the Waterfall" emulate the image of the rock formation with streams flowing down to gather in a pool below. The visual detail provides a consistency to the content, also serving to draw attention to the idea of repetition and synthesis which proves key to the understanding of the scene with the dog and deer at sunrise. In a more bold departure, Oliver jumps around between subjects in "Singapore." She effectively soothes readers and lures them back into a somewhat otherwise disturbing scene with the woman in the bathroom. Oliver uses the form of poetry to communicate an unspoken sympathy with both reader and subject. Her language and its visual manifestation often work harmoniously to relate the experience of what the text connotes.
