Not a soft poet.

The week the blackthorn went over, which was late this year, I sat with this in the hospital car park in Carmarthen on three afternoons running while my mother had her appointments. It is far too heavy a book to hold in a car. Hardback, cloth, the size and the weight of a hymnal, and my arms ached by the second afternoon. I would not have chosen it for those particular afternoons and it turned out to be exactly the right thing for them, which is not at all the same as saying that it consoled me. It didn't. It simply kept being interested in things, and that was useful.

It runs backwards. Newest poems first and then back through fifty years to 1963, so you meet her old and plain and entirely unembarrassed, and then travel back to find her younger and denser and much more in love with the strangeness of her own sentences. I am still not sure that was the right decision. It flatters the late work, which is the work needing flattery least, and it means the book gets harder as you go, which is the wrong way round for a doorstep of a selected. But there is something in it, too. You watch a habit of looking being taken back apart into its pieces.

Now the objection, because it has been made to me directly. My book group did this in November and Nia said 'oh, greetings cards!' before we had got ten minutes in, and half the room laughed, and I sat there feeling about fifteen years old. She isn't wrong about a third of it. There is a move Oliver makes where she notices a thing exactly — a black snake going over a warm road, the hinge of a grasshopper's jaw working sideways — and then in the last two lines tells you what to feel about it. When she does that she is greetings cards. She does it often. That is the price of writing five hundred poems and publishing most of them.

But the other two thirds. The looking is real, it is unusually patient, and it doesn't flinch. The poem about the loons dying with lead in them. The ones about her father, which are much harder and colder than her reputation allows. The pond in a dozen different weathers. She goes back to the same half-mile of Provincetown for five decades, and I don't call that repeating herself; I think it is the only method anyone has ever found that works. Fifty years of one pond will teach you more than fifty ponds in one year. My grandmother knew four fields the way most people know their own hands, and could tell you what was wrong in any of them from the gate.

I skipped Wild Geese. I want to be honest about that. I have had it read at two funerals and a wedding and I can no longer hear it; the words go past like a hymn learned before you knew what it meant. The same has happened to the one about the one wild and precious life. That is not the poems' fault. It happens to good poems. But it does mean a selected of this size is partly a museum, and you walk past the famous rooms rather fast, slightly embarrassed.

How to read it, if you are going to: not straight through. I tried, got four days in, and it turned to weather-noise, everything beginning to sound like everything else. Five pages, then out to the garden, then five more. It is a book for a windowsill rather than for a chair. And it really is too heavy for a hospital bag, which I mention only because I nearly bought a second copy for my mother and then thought better of it.

Nine rather than ten because of that slack third, and because a selected of this size is a publisher's object more than a poet's; the shape of it belongs to somebody in marketing rather than to her. If you're buying it for a person who doesn't already read poetry, buy them a thin one first. New and Selected, Volume One, if you can still find it anywhere. Then this, later, once they have the habit and can be trusted to skip.