What to Do with Mary Oliver?

Sonny Williams in Contemporary Poetry Review talks about various collections of Mary Oliver and how the unflagging optimism makes for one note that fatigues the way Easy Listening can. She creates amiable closeness through questions and second person. The tone is conversational, in the sense of sitting down with tea speaking in iambic rounds, even if her line breaks later shifted to break the rhythm somewhat. She writes rather prosaically.
He feels she doesn’t stretch herself but then, she’s a best seller of not verbal aerobics, but comfort. Criticism of her on this count is common but her niche is that; soothing ideas people want to hear. But beyond that she is making a conscious choice. She counters the glum gloom and clever clip of speed other writers and media offer. She refuses to play. This gets poet people agitated.
Is this a matter of what David Orr said in the February 4, 2007 NY Times article, Frost on the Edge [requires Bugmenot]

Sometimes this acrimony stems from a genuine aesthetic disagreement that is serious and important and (as one might say in Poetryland) worthy of a Panel Discussion, Followed by a Short Reception. Other times, though, it’s just a matter of writers carping at each other because they realize that if they didn’t, people would have a hard time telling them apart.
The longest-running feud is probably the low-intensity border war between so-called experimental poets and their “mainstream” brethren. Since the distinctions can be hard to parse (to most people, saying “mainstream poetry” is like saying “mainstream tapestry-weaving”), it’s helpful to turn to the experts.

He’s just being quippy. (And make me laugh til I tear up until he gets to the earnest part about Frost’s notebooks). What he gets at is the divergent aims: are words the vehicle to get to intended meaning or are words themselves the meaning?
Making Poetry by the second direction, I suspect, isn’t Oliver’s primary aim. By that I mean life and living well comes first and after that communicating the message, not perfecting the means reigns. She seems to want to step clear of the whole debate of wordsmithing. And yet apparently she has won heaps of awards.
I’ve read excerpts and browsed her books now and then. I tried sitting down with her Why I Wake Early for a week, having heard so many people tout her, but it didn’t reach me. I glazed over and skimmed and kept waiting for something she doesn’t do.
Although I do find it rather pleasing that she is lesbian without feeling a need to make it the central politics of her writing. She can be 70 without poems moping about aches. She can be American without ranting against Bush. She can be in grief while reaching for hope and security instead of making an art form of hytrionic wallowing. She writes in the rhythm of walking and talking. She reflects the realities important to her. What more could one ask of a poet?
She allows other aspects of her life to take precedence, and with her it seems to be the feeling of being centred in fuzzy abstracts of benevolent nature/god in an extremely ordered world. Cynicism doesn’t gain admittance, which is her call as guardian of her head. Flares of wit would distract from the hundreds of hues of foliage. It isn’t my taste but its hers and many. As she put it in After Arguing Against The Contention That Art Must Come From Discontent

I remember they said it would be hard. I scramble
by luck into a little pocket out of
the wind and begin to beat on the stones
with my scratched numb hands, rocking back and forth
in silent laughter there in the dark–
“Made it again!” Oh how I love this climb!
— the whispering to the stones, the drag, the weight
as your muscles crack and ease on, working
right. They are back there, discontent,
waiting to be driven forth. I pound
on the earth, riding the earth past the stars:
“Made it again! Made it again!”