DISCOVERIES

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New and Selected Poems

Volume Two

Mary Oliver

Beacon Press: 178 pp., $24.95

IT has always seemed, across her 15 books of poetry, five of prose and several essays and chapbooks, that Mary Oliver might leave us any minute. Even a 1984 Pulitzer Prize couldn’t pin her to the ground. She’d change quietly into a heron or a bear and fly or walk off forever. Her poems contain windows, doors, transformations, hints on how to escape the body; there’s the “glamour of death” and the “life after the earth-life.” This urge to be transformed is yoked to a joy in this moment, this life, this body. “Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective,” she writes in “Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond.” “I think there isn’t anything in this world I don’t / admire,” she writes in “Hum,” one of the 42 new poems in this collection, which goes back to 1994. The new poems teem with creation: ravens, bees, hawks, box turtles, bears. The landscape is Thoreauvian: ponds, marsh, grass and cattails; New England’s “salt brightness”; and fields in “pale twilight.” The poems from “Why I Wake Early” (2004) are, in contrast, full of white things and “untrimmable light”; from “Owls and Other Fantasies” (2003), of watery sounds, singing, rain; from “West Wind” (1997), of starry distances and traveling. A reader sees the outlines of autobiography. Isn’t that what an author intends, in choosing, if not favorites, at least signposts in selected work?

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A Zoo in My Luggage

Gerald Durrell

Penguin Press: 198 pp., $14 paper

GERALD DURRELL is a writer you may have read as a child but not returned to. His books, notably “My Family and Other Animals,” leave an extraordinary sense of well-being. Born in India in 1925, Durrell grew up in England and Corfu, Greece; he’s led animal-collecting trips around the world. In 1959 he founded his own zoo, the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, on the British Isle of Jersey. “A Zoo in My Luggage,” first published here in 1960 and now reissued, is the story of the collecting he did in Bafut, West Africa, for this zoo. Durrell worried that endangered species, particularly those with no “touristic value,” were inadequately protected. The mission of zoos, he felt, was to establish breeding colonies of such animals. In Bafut, he collected a black-footed mongoose, a bush baby, a water chevrotain (a kind of antelope) and many other animals. He tells us how to catch a python, how to smoke out a hollow tree (to catch several species at once), how to capture animals in grasslands and rain forests. He and his party are guests of the Fon of Bafut, a great dancer and drinking man. Eventually, some 250 animals are transported to Durrell’s sister’s house in Bournemouth, and thence to the Jersey zoo. This book may remind you of wanting, once upon a time, to be Durrell or Jacques Cousteau or Jane Goodall. Such worthy goals, untrammeled by years of graduate school or a need to pay the rent!

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Kinshu

Autumn Brocade

Teru Miyamoto, translated from the Japanese by Roger K. Thomas

New Directions: 196 pp., $22.95

“KINSHU” is the chilling story of two people who meet by chance, 10 years after their divorce, on a gondola going up Mt. Zao. Yasuaki, the ex-husband, was married just two years to Aki when he attempted a double-suicide with his mistress, Yukako. She died, but he survived, bringing shame and grief to Aki and her father, a wealthy businessman. The hapless Yasuaki went from job to job, relationship to relationship; Aki remarried and had a son with cerebral palsy. After their meeting in the gondola, the two begin a correspondence, hoping to fill the gap left by horrified silence after the suicide. The coexistence of sadness and joy and the effort to overcome bad karma are the themes of a novel filled with gray skies and ice-covered trees. “The strange darkness emanating from Yukako had the same quality as the remote harbor town on the Sea of Japan,” Yasuaki recalls. This darkness, falling over dahlia gardens and cherry blossoms, gives “Kinshu” a truly autumnal, ghostly feel.