POETRY

NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press: $20; 272 pp. ) If you have been meaning, for years perhaps, to read more poetry, this book (due out later this month) is a good place to start. Mary Oliver is a gentle, unostentatious poet, and you will never once feel that a poem of hers was a waste of time, or that it took you into a world (emotional or physical) that you didn’t want to enter. This volume contains a selection from eight of Oliver’s previously published books, including “American Primitive,” for which she won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The earliest, from “No Voyage and Other Poems,” were written in 1963. These poems are almost all about nature, with some storytelling about various aunts, or Oliver’s father, or a walnut tree, but with very few appearances by the author. In the newer poems, by contrast, she can’t keep herself out, try as she might: “so this is the world./ I’m not in it./ It is beautiful . “ As luck would have it, though, this self-consciousness is a rich and graceful addition and does not mar the childlike, Blake-eyed revelatory quality of her writing. The new poems have an unaggressive, unabashed sense of what life should be: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life/ I was a bride married to amazement./ I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”