Oliver, Mary
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Mary Oliver | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | September 10, 1935 Maple Heights, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | January 17, 2019 (aged 83) Hobe Sound, Florida, U.S. |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Education | Vassar College Ohio State University |
| Notable awards | National Book Award (1992) Pulitzer Prize (1984) |
| Partner | Molly Malone Cook |
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Mary Oliver (born September 10, 1935, Maple Heights, Ohio, U.S.—died January 17, 2019, Hobe Sound, Florida) was an American poet whose work reflects a deep communion with the natural world as well as a belief that poetry “mustn’t be fancy.” Oliver, who had a devoted following, was known for her use of plain language and accessible imagery. In 1984 she won a Pulitzer Prize for the collection American Primitive (1983).
Oliver stated that she grew up in a “very dysfunctional family” and had a “difficult childhood.” She later attended the Ohio State University and Vassar College but did not earn a degree. She worked for a time as a secretary for the sister of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay’s influence is apparent in Oliver’s first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems (1963). These lyrical nature poems are set in a variety of locales, especially the Ohio of Oliver’s youth. Her childhood plays a more central role in The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems (1972), in which she attempted to re-create the past through memory and myth. The Night Traveler (1978) explores the themes of birth, decay, and death through the conceit of a journey into the underworld of classical mythology. In these poems Oliver’s fluent imagery weaves together the worlds of humans, animals, and plants.
Oliver’s volume American Primitive (1983), which won a Pulitzer Prize, glorifies the natural world, reflecting the American fascination with the ideal of the pastoral life as it was first expressed by Henry David Thoreau. In House of Light (1990) Oliver explored the rewards of solitude in nature. New and Selected Poems (1992), which won a National Book Award; White Pine (1994); Blue Pastures (1995); West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems (1997); Why I Wake Early (2004); and A Thousand Mornings (2012) are later collections.
Oliver also wrote about the writing of poetry in two slender but rich volumes, A Poetry Handbook (1995) and Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998). Winter Hours (1999) includes poetry, prose poems, and essays on other poets. In Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (2004), Oliver explored the “connection between soul and landscape.”
In addition to her writing, Oliver also taught at a number of schools, notably Bennington College (1996–2001).
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Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) was an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and the National Book Award in 1992. She found inspiration for her work in nature and had a lifelong habit of solitary walks in the wild. Her poetry is characterized by wonderment at the natural environment, vivid imagery, and unadorned language. In 2007, she was declared the best-selling poet in the United States.
Early life
Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland.[1] Her father was a social studies teacher and athletics coach in the Cleveland public schools. As a child, she spent a great deal of time outside, going on walks or reading. In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor in 1992, Oliver said of growing up in Ohio:
In a 2011 interview with Maria Shriver, Oliver called her family dysfunctional, adding that though her childhood was very hard, writing helped her create her own world.[3] Oliver revealed in the interview that she had been sexually abused as a child and had experienced recurring nightmares.[3]
Oliver began writing poetry at the age of 14. She graduated from the local high school in Maple Heights. In the summer of 1951, at age 15, she attended the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, now known as Interlochen Arts Camp, where she was in the percussion section of the National High School Orchestra. At 17, she visited the home of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Austerlitz, New York,[1][4] where she formed a friendship with the late poet's sister Norma. Oliver and Norma spent the next six to seven years at the estate organizing Edna St. Vincent Millay's papers.
Oliver studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s but did not receive a degree at either college.[1]
Career
Oliver worked at ''Steepletop'', Edna St. Vincent Millay's estate, as secretary to the poet's sister.[5] Her first collection of poems, No Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963, when she was 28.[6] During the early 1980s, Oliver taught at Case Western Reserve University. Her fifth collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984.[7][1][8] She was Poet In Residence at Bucknell University (1986) and Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College (1991), then moved to Bennington, Vermont, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001.[6]
She won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light (1990), and New and Selected Poems (1992) won the National Book Award.[1][9] Oliver's work turns to nature for inspiration and describes the sense of wonder it instilled in her. "When it's over" she wrote, "I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms" ("When Death Comes" from New and Selected Poems). Her collections Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), and New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004) build the themes. The first and second parts of Leaf and the Cloud are featured in The Best American Poetry 1999 and 2000,[10] and her essays appear in Best American Essays 1996, 1998, and 2001.[6] Oliver was the editor of the 2009 edition of Best American Essays.
Poetic identity
Oliver's poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England. Provincetown is the principal setting for her work after she moved there in the 1960s.[4] Influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau, she is known for her clear and poignant observations of the natural world. According to the 1983 Chronology of American Literature, her collection American Primitive "presents a new kind of Romanticism that refuses to acknowledge boundaries between nature and the observing self."[11] Nature stirred her creativity, and Oliver, an avid walker, often pursued inspiration on foot. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home:[6] shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon, and humpback whales. In Long Life, she writes, "[I] go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything."[4] She once said: "When things are going well, you know, the walk does not get rapid or get anywhere: I finally just stop and write. That's a successful walk!" She said she once found herself walking in the woods with no pen and later hid pencils in the trees so she would never be stuck like that again.[4] Oliver often carried a 3-by-5-inch hand-sewn notebook for recording impressions and phrases.[4] Maxine Kumin called her "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms."[12] Oliver said her favorite poets were Walt Whitman, Rumi, Hafez, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.[3]
Oliver was also compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues. Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release. Though criticized for writing poetry that assumes a close relationship between women and nature, she found that the self is only strengthened through immersion in the natural environment.[13] Oliver is also known for her straightforward language and accessible themes.[10] The Harvard Review describes her work as an antidote to "inattention and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives. She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making."[10]
In 2007, The New York Times called Oliver "far and away, this country's best-selling poet."[14]
Personal life
On a visit to the town of Austerlitz, New York in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who became her partner for over 40 years.[4] In Our World, a book of Cook's photos and journal excerpts Oliver compiled after Cook's death, Oliver writes, "I took one look [at Cook] and fell, hook and tumble." Cook was Oliver's literary agent. They made their home largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook's death in 2005, and where Oliver continued to live[10] until moving to Florida.[15] Of Provincetown, she said: "I too fell in love with the town, that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers.[...] M. and I decided to stay."[4]
Oliver valued her privacy and gave very few interviews, saying she preferred for her writing to speak for itself.[6]
Death
In 2012, Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer, but was treated and given a "clean bill of health."[16] Oliver died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019, at the age of 83.[17][18][19]
Critical reception
In the Women's Review of Books, Maxine Kumin called Oliver an "indefatigable guide to the natural world, particularly to its lesser-known aspects."[12] Reviewing Dream Work for The Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America's finest poets: "visionary as Emerson [... she is] among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey."[1] New York Times reviewer Bruce Bennetin wrote that American Primitive "insists on the primacy of the physical"[1] and Holly Prado of Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote that it "touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity."[1]
Vicki Graham suggests Oliver oversimplifies the affiliation of gender and nature: "Oliver's celebration of dissolution into the natural world troubles some critics: her poems flirt dangerously with romantic assumptions about the close association of women with nature that many theorists claim put the woman writer at risk."[13] In her article "The Language of Nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver", Diane S. Bond writes, "few feminists have wholeheartedly appreciated Oliver's work, and though some critics have read her poems as revolutionary reconstructions of the female subject, others remain skeptical that identification with nature can empower women."[20] In The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Sue Russell wrote, "Oliver will never be a balladeer of contemporary lesbian life in the vein of Marilyn Hacker, or an important political thinker like Adrienne Rich; but the fact that she chooses not to write from a similar political or narrative stance makes her all the more valuable to our collective culture."[21]
Selected awards and honors
- 1969/70 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.[6]
- 1980 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship[6]
- 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for American Primitive[8]
- 1991 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light[22]
- 1992 National Book Award for Poetry for New and Selected Poems[9]
- 1998 Lannan Literary Award for poetry[6]
- 1998 Honorary Doctorate from The Art Institute of Boston[6]
- 2003 Honorary membership into Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University.[23]
- 2007 Honorary Doctorate Dartmouth College[6]
- 2008 Honorary Doctorate Tufts University[6]
- 2012 Honorary Doctorate from Marquette University[24]
- 2012 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Poetry for A Thousand Mornings[25]
Works
Poetry collections
- 1963 No Voyage, and Other Poems Dent (New York, NY), expanded edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1965.
- 1972 The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems Harcourt (New York, NY) ISBN 978-0-15-177750-1
- 1978 The Night Traveler Bits Press
- 1978 Sleeping in the Forest Ohio University (a 12-page chapbook, p. 49–60 in The Ohio Review—Vol. 19, No. 1 [Winter 1978])
- 1979 Twelve Moons Little, Brown (Boston, MA), ISBN 0316650013
- 1983 American Primitive Little, Brown (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-316-65004-5
- 1986 Dream Work Atlantic Monthly Press (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-87113-069-3
- 1987 Provincetown Appletree Alley, limited edition with woodcuts by Barnard Taylor
- 1990 House of Light Beacon Press (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6810-6
- 1992 New and Selected Poems [volume one] Beacon Press (Boston, MA), ISBN 978-0-8070-6818-2
- 1994 White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems Harcourt (San Diego, CA) ISBN 978-0-15-600120-5
- 1995 Blue Pastures Harcourt (New York, NY) ISBN 978-0-15-600215-8
- 1997 West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-395-85085-5
- 1999 Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-395-85087-9
- 2000 The Leaf and the Cloud Da Capo (Cambridge, Massachusetts), (prose poem) ISBN 978-0-306-81073-2
- 2002 What Do We Know Da Capo (Cambridge, Massachusetts) ISBN 978-0-306-81206-4
- 2003 Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6868-7
- 2004 Why I Wake Early: New Poems Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6879-3
- 2004 Blue Iris: Poems and Essays Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6882-3
- 2004 Wild geese: selected poems, Bloodaxe, ISBN 978-1-85224-628-0
- 2005 New and Selected Poems, volume two Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6886-1
- 2005 At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver (audio cd)
- 2006 Thirst: Poems (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6896-0
- 2007 Our World with photographs by Molly Malone Cook, Beacon (Boston, MA)
- 2008 The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays, Beacon Press, ISBN 978-0-8070-6884-7
- 2008 Red Bird Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6892-2
- 2009 Evidence Beacon (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6898-4
- 2010 Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-8070-6899-1
- 2012 A Thousand Mornings Penguin (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-477-7
- 2013 Dog Songs Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-478-4
- 2014 Blue Horses Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-479-1
- 2015 Felicity Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-59420-676-4
- 2017 Devotions The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver Penguin Press (New York, NY) ISBN 978-0-399-56324-9
Non-fiction books and other collections
- 1994 A Poetry Handbook Harcourt (San Diego, CA) ISBN 978-0-15-672400-5
- 1998 Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA) ISBN 978-0-395-85086-2
- 2004 Long Life: Essays and Other Writings Da Capo (Cambridge, Massachusetts) ISBN 978-0-306-81412-9
- 2016 Upstream: Selected Essays Penguin (New York, NY) ISBN 978-1-594-20670-2
Works in translation
Catalan
- 2018 Ocell Roig (translated by Corina Oproae) Bilingual Edition. Godall Edicions.
See also
- Poppies, poem by Mary Oliver
- In Blackwater Woods, poem by Mary Oliver
- Lesbian Poetry
References
- "Poetry Foundation Oliver biography". Retrieved September 7, 2010.
- Ratiner, Steve (December 9, 1992). "Poet Mary Oliver: a Solitary Walk". Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved March 6, 2018.
- "Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver". Oprah.com. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
- Duenwald, Mary. (July 5, 2009.) "The Land and Words of Mary Oliver, the Bard of Provincetown". New York Times. Retrieved September 7, 2010.
- Stevenson, Mary Reif (1969). Contemporary Authors. USA: Fredrick G. Ruffner Jr. p. 395.
- Mary Oliver's bio at publisher Beacon Press (note that original link is dead; see version archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20090508075809/http://www.beacon.org/contributorinfo.cfm?ContribID=1299 ; retrieved October 19, 2015).
- "Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Mary Oliver Dies at 83". The New York Times. Associated Press. January 17, 2019. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 17, 2019.
- ""Poetry: Past winners & finalists by category". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved April 8, 2012.
- "National Book Awards–1992". National Book Foundation. Retrieved April 8, 2012.
- "Oliver Biography". Academy of American Poets. Retrieved September 12, 2012.
- "The Chronology of American Literature". 2004.[permanent dead link]
- Kumin, Maxine. "Intimations of Mortality". Women's Review of Books 10: April 7, 1993, p. 16.
- Graham, p. 352
- Garner, Dwight. (February 18, 2007.) "Inside the List". New York Times. Retrieved September 7, 2010.
- Tippett, Krista (February 5, 2015). "Mary Oliver — Listening to the World". On Being. Archived from the original on November 11, 2016. Retrieved September 6, 2020.
- Helgeson, Mariah (February 16, 2015). "Mary Oliver's Cancer Poem". On Being. Retrieved January 20, 2019.
- Neary, Lynn (January 17, 2019). "Beloved Poet Mary Oliver Who Believed Poetry Mustn't Be Fancy Dies at 83". NPR. Retrieved January 20, 2019.
- Parini, Jay (February 15, 2019). "Mary Oliver obituary". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved February 18, 2019.
- "Mary Oliver". Poetry Foundation. May 7, 2019. Retrieved May 8, 2019.
- Bond, p. 1
- Russell, pp. 21–22.
- "Book awards: L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award". Library Thing. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
- "Phi Beta Kappa • Remembering Phi Beta Kappa member and poet Mary".
- Lawder, Melanie (November 14, 2012). "Poet Mary Oliver receives honorary degree". The Marquette Tribune. Archived from the original on March 5, 2013. Retrieved December 6, 2012.
- "Goodreads Choice Awards 2012". Goodreads. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
Sources
- Bond, Diane. "The Language of Nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver." Womens Studies 21:1 (1992), p. 1.
- Graham, Vicki. "'Into the Body of Another': Mary Oliver and the Poetics of Becoming Other." Papers on Language and Literature, 30:4 (Fall 1994), pp. 352–353, pp. 366–368.
- McNew, Janet. "Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry". Contemporary Literature, 30:1 (Spring 1989).
- "Oliver, Mary." American Environmental Leaders: From Colonial Times to the Present, Anne Becher, and Joseph Richey, Grey House Publishing, 2nd edition, 2008. Credo Reference.
- Russell, Sue. "Mary Oliver: The Poet and the Persona." The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 4:4 (Fall 1997), pp. 21–22.
- "1992." The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt, Houghton Mifflin, 1st edition, 2004. Credo Reference
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Mary Oliver, 83, Prize-Winning Poet of the Natural World, Is Dead
Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work, with its plain language and minute attention to the natural world, drew a wide following while dividing critics, died on Thursday at her home in Hobe Sound, Fla. She was 83.
Her literary executor, Bill Reichblum, confirmed the death. Ms. Oliver had been treated for lymphoma, which was first diagnosed in 2015.
A prolific writer with more than 20 volumes of verse to her credit, Ms. Oliver received a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her collection “American Primitive,” published by Little, Brown & Company. She won a National Book Award in 1992 for “New and Selected Poems,” published by Beacon Press.
Ms. Oliver, whose work appeared often in The New Yorker and other magazines, was a phenomenon: a poet whose work sold strongly. Her books frequently appeared on the best-seller list of the Poetry Foundation, which uses data from Nielsen BookScan, a service that tracks book sales, putting her on a par with Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States, as one of the best-selling poets in the country.
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Her poems, which are built of unadorned language and accessible imagery, have a pedagogical, almost homiletic quality. It was this, combined with their relative brevity, that seemed to endear her work to a broad public, including clerics, who quoted it in their sermons; poetry therapists, who found its uplifting sensibility well suited to their work; composers, like Ronald Perera and Augusta Read Thomas, who set it to music; and celebrities like Laura Bush and Maria Shriver.
All this, combined with the throngs that turned out for her public readings, conspired to give Ms. Oliver, fairly late in life, the aura of a reluctant, bookish rock star.
Throughout her work, Ms. Oliver was occupied with intimate observations of flora and fauna, as many of her titles — “Mushrooms,” “Egrets,” “The Swan,” “The Rabbit,” “The Waterfall” — attest. Read on one level, these poems are sensualist still lifes: Often set in and around the woods, marshes and tide pools of Provincetown, Mass., where she lived for more than 40 years, they offer impeccable descriptions of the land and its nonhuman tenants in a spare, formally conservative, conversational style.
In “Spring,” here in its entirety, she wrote:
I lift my face to the pale flowers
of the rain. They’re soft as linen,
clean as holy water. Meanwhile
my dog runs off, noses down packed leaves
into damp, mysterious tunnels.
He says the smells are rising now
stiff and lively; he says the beasts
are waking up now full of oil,
sleep sweat, tag-ends of dreams. The rain
rubs its shining hands all over me.
My dog returns and barks fiercely, he says
each secret body is the richest advisor ,
deep in the black earth such fuming
nuggets of joy!
For her abiding communion with nature, Ms. Oliver was often compared to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. For her quiet, measured observations, and for her fiercely private personal mien (she gave many readings but few interviews, saying she wanted her work to speak for itself), she was likened to Emily Dickinson.
Ms. Oliver often described her vocation as the observation of life, and it is clear from her texts that she considered the vocation a quasi-religious one. Her poems — those about nature as well as those on other subjects — are suffused with a pulsating, almost mystical spirituality, as in the work of the American Transcendentalists or English poets like William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
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Readers were also drawn to Ms. Oliver’s poems by their quality of confiding intimacy; to read one is to accompany her on one of her many walks through the woods or by the shore. Poems often came to her on these walks, and she prepared for this eventuality by secreting pencils in the woods near her home .
Throughout Ms. Oliver’s career, critical reception of her work was mixed. Some reviewers were put off by the surface simplicity of her poems and, in later years, by her populist reach. Reviewing her first collection, “No Voyage,” in The New York Times Book Review in 1965, James Dickey wrote, “She is good, but predictably good,” adding:
“She never seems quite to be in her poems, as adroit as some of them are, but is always outside them, putting them together from the available literary elements.”
More recently, David Orr, the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, was even more dismissive. In 2011, he referred to Ms. Oliver as a writer “about whose poetry one can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it.” (That comment drew a retort from Ruth Franklin of The New Yorker, who wrote in an admiring article about Ms. Oliver in 2017, “The joke falls flat, considering how much of Oliver’s work revolves around the violence of the natural world.”)
Ms. Oliver’s champions argued that what lay beneath her work’s seemingly unruffled surface was a dark, brooding undertow, which together with the surface constituted a cleareyed exploration of the individual’s place in the cosmos.
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“Her corpus is deceptively elementary,” the writer Alice Gregory says in an essay on the website of the Poetry Foundation. “But you miss a lot by allowing the large language to overshadow the more muted connective tissue. Paying such crude attention will not grant you the fortifying effects Oliver has to offer.”
Mary Oliver was born on Sept. 10, 1935, in Cleveland to Edward and Helen (Vlasak) Oliver, and grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. Her father was a teacher and her mother a secretary at an elementary school.
In one of her rare interviews, with Ms. Shriver in O: The Oprah Magazine in 2011, Ms. Oliver spoke of having been sexually abused as a child, though she did not elaborate.
“I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood,” she told Ms. Shriver. “So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.”
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Leaving home as a teenager — she would study briefly at Ohio State University and Vassar College but took no degree — Ms. Oliver spontaneously drove to Steepletop, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s former home in Austerlitz, N.Y., near the Massachusetts border. Ms. Oliver lived at Steepletop for the next half-dozen years, helping Millay’s sister Norma organize her papers.
In the late 1950s, on a return visit to Steepletop, Ms. Oliver met Molly Malone Cook , a photographer, who became her life partner and literary agent. Ms. Cook died in 2005. No immediate family members survive.
Ms. Oliver taught at Bennington College and elsewhere. Her other poetry collections include “The River Styx, Ohio” (1972), “House of Light” (1990), “The Leaf and the Cloud” (2000), “Evidence” (2009), “Blue Horses” (2014) and “Felicity” (2015).
Her prose books include two about the craft of poetry, “Rules for the Dance” (1998) and “A Poetry Handbook” (1994), and “Long Life: Essays and Other Writings” (2004).
Given its seeming contradiction — shallow and profound, uplifting and elegiac — Ms. Oliver’s verse is perhaps best read as poetic portmanteau, one that binds up both the primal joy and the primal melancholy of being alive.
For her, each had at its core a similar wild ecstasy. In one of her best-known poems, “When Death Comes,” she wrote:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
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"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift."
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