(In fact, the entire Mary Oliver motif in “The Anthologist” may well be a sly joke on Baker’s part.) By any measure, Oliver is a distinguished and important poet. Yes, he’s a fictional character, but he’s precisely the kind of person who tends to look down on Mary Oliver’s poetry. And yet each has something.”Ĭoming from Chowder, this statement is a surprise. In her work, he finds consolation: “I immediately felt more sure of what I was doing.” Of her poems, he says, “They’re very simple. For solace and inspiration, he turns to poets who have been his touchstones-Louise Bogan, Theodore Roethke, Sara Teasdale-before discovering Oliver. His girlfriend, with whom he’s lived for eight years, has just left him, ostensibly because he has been unable to write the long-overdue introduction to a poetry anthology that he has been putting together. “Mary Oliver is saving my life,” Paul Chowder, the title character of Nicholson Baker’s novel “ The Anthologist,” scrawls in the margins of Oliver’s “ New and Selected Poems, Volume One.” A struggling poet, Chowder is suffering from a severe case of writer’s block.
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