'Upstream' Both Boring and Brilliant

Imagine your sage grandmother telling sentimental stories from her youth to lull you to sleep as a child. That, in essence, is what Mary Oliver’s “Upstream” accomplishes. The nostalgic tone throughout the text, with frequent interruptions of quirky idiosyncrasies, imbues the book with a sense of familiarity that fortifies Oliver’s arguments. Unlike a grandmother’s stories, however, “Upstream” is a collection of short essays divided into five formal sections. Each section’s essays relate to one another, sometimes so directly that they seem to converse with one another. Sometimes one section explains another; generally, though, the sections are rather disjoint. The five sections each have their own personality and purpose but work together to accomplish the book’s goal of reviving humanity’s love of nature while concurrently elucidating Oliver’s identity as a writer.

The first section is misleading in a way; it lures in a broad audience who can sympathize with Oliver as an artist in search of herself. The second section is a nice bit of prose to cuddle up with in bed, but only because it is boring enough to put you to sleep: It contains three essays primarily devoted to categorical descriptions of sea-life, and Oliver must have written the third section with only English majors and fellow writers in mind. She discusses a few of her literary inspirations, all 18th century poets, and provides a brief biography of each of them. While she is analytical and proposes a few nuanced interpretations of their work, Oliver generally approaches these poets with too much reverence to say anything critical about them. Therefore, the four essays in section three grow tiresome as she merely praises the dead white male poets, an experience reminiscent of a dogmatic high school experience. Section four returns to the topic of animal life, but in a much more captivating manner. This section teems with emotion and nostalgia to elicit a sense of empathy from Oliver’s reader. Finally, section five concludes “Upstream” by contrasting the simpler times of Oliver’s home, Provincetown, with the current state of the city as “a place to visit or lie for a while, and to spend money.” Economic struggles in the city robbed it of life and relegated the once-quaint town to a tourist attraction. Since Oliver invites her reader’s imagination to her pleasant New England sanctuary throughout the first four sections, even readers who have never heard of Provincetown will lament its loss in section five.

One cannot discuss “Upstream” without mentioning Oliver’s relationship to nature. Oliver conveys a sense of solitude throughout the book, with the exception of two instances in which she mentions her late partner, Molly Malone Cook (referred to as M. in “Upstream”). Consequently, Oliver engages with nature alone and seems to be the only human interacting with nature in a nondestructive way. When she discusses her time spent in forests, at beaches, or strolling around ponds, it is as if she is whispering to her readers alluring secrets about the life of nature. At times, Oliver’s meditation is extremely effective, such as in her essay “Swoon,” where she describes the forgotten miracle of spider-web making. She magnifies the spider’s microcosm that exists in her stairwell and humanizes the spider in order to underscore oneness within with the natural world. In “Swoon,” Oliver essentially attempts to dismantle the man-made hierarchy that suggests our species should reign above all others. At times, however, Oliver’s description of nature goes into exhaustive and unnecessary detail. The second section drags on for longer than necessary and only contains a few quick moral lessons to provide the section with a small bit of importance.

Oliver makes up for the lack of universally-interesting topics with her unparalleled writing style. “Upstream” demonstrates her background in poetry with its lyrical and descriptive style. Lines such as “the steamy river of dreams” allow the reader to sink into the imagery of the book as if it were one lengthy poem. Additionally, Oliver’s wise aphorisms throughout the book endow “Upstream” with a heightened sense of importance; the book does not consist of merely pretty words but rather words to live by. [Oliver also often ends her essays with a pithy and distinctive phrase such as “Attention is the beginning of devotion” and “The universe is full of radiant suggestion.”