Mary Oliver and Jorie Graham both exhibit autobiographical poetic engagement with beauty, Oliver’s connected with the English Romantic poets, American Transcendentalists, simple Christian moralism and metaphysical concepts, and Rumi-like consciousness with the ontological wonder of Nature as such and expressed in simple narrative lyricism or exclamations, most often focused on contemplation of wildlife; Graham’s connected to philosophically-based and cinematic movement of consciousness, often symbolized by a river, and which expresses a postmodern deconstruction of such beauty as Oliver’s and yet has aria-like exquisite passages of beauty, grounding her poetic idiom in the philosophic complexity of perception and thought and expressed in her unique dense phrasing as well as subtle references to philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas.