Mary Oliver (1935 -2019)

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver

(1935 - 2019)

Mary Oliver was an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books, “particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” Oliver’s poetry focused on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, “lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.” Kumin also noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.” Oliver’s poetry won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement. Reviewing Dream Work (1986) for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America’s finest poets, as “visionary as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson.”

Mary Oliver was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She would retreat from a difficult home to the nearby woods, where she would build huts of sticks and grass and write poems. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either institution. As a young poet, Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers. Oliver is notoriously reticent about her private life, but it was during this period that she met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work. Known for its clear and poignant observations and evocative use of the natural world, Oliver’s poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition. Her work received early critical attention; American Primitive (1983), her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. According to Bruce Bennetin the New York Times Book Review, American Primitive,“insists on the primacy of the physical.” Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works.” Holly Prado of the Los Angeles Times Book Review also applauded Oliver’s original voice, writing that American Primitive “touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.”

Dream Work (1986) continues Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature” according to Prado in a later review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Ostriker considered Oliver “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.” For Ostriker, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’ ... into the world of historical and personal suffering. ... She confronts as well, steadily,” Ostriker continued, “what she cannot change.”

The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms was also evident in New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award. The volume contains poems from eight of Oliver’s previous volumes as well as previously unpublished, newer work. Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, noticed that Oliver’s earliest poems were almost always oriented toward nature, but they seldom examined the self and were almost never personal. In contrast, Oliver appeared constantly in her later works. But as Reynolds noted “this self-consciousness is a rich and graceful addition.” Just as the contributor for Publishers Weekly called particular attention to the pervasive tone of amazement with regard to things seen in Oliver’s work, Reynolds found Oliver’s writings to have a “Blake-eyed revelatory quality.” Oliver summed up her desire for amazement in her poem “When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems: “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.”

Oliver continued her celebration of the natural world in her next collections, including Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004), and Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (2010). Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman. “Oliver’s poetry,” wrote Poetry magazine contributor Richard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling.” 

A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, Oliver routinely published a new book every year or two. Her main themes continue to be the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the limits of human consciousness and language in articulating such a meeting. Jeanette McNew in Contemporary Literature described “Oliver’s visionary goal,” as “constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully conferred subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition. … At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal ‘a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy / like a shadow.’” Her last books included A Thousand Mornings (2012), Dog Songs (2013), Blue Horses (2014), Felicity (2015), Upstream: Selected Essays (2016), and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017).

Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. In addition to such major awards as the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Oliver  received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award.

Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Hobe Sound, Florida, until her death in early 2019. She was 83.

POETRY FOUNDATION

The Journey by Mary Oliver

 

THE JOURNEY 

By Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice –

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do –

determined to save

the only life that you could save.

 

Mary Oliver

 

Why you need Mary Oliver’s poetry in your life right now

Rosalind Moran

9 February 2021

Your solo walks will never be the same after reading some nature-inspired poems by Mary Oliver

The solitary walk has become emblematic of lockdown life. Each day, millions slip their keys into their pockets and go their individual ways, looping through hollowed-out town centres and predictable streets and parks. Some wear headphones and listen to music or speak with invisible interlocutors. Others walk in silence, heads thrown back, finding relief in being temporarily alone with their thoughts.

Like many of us, I have found these past few months isolating—and although I enjoy my walks, I find I miss having the purposeful stride of a person with a destination. The straight lines of direct routes have been replaced by meandering circles. For this reason, among others, it has been a particular joy to rediscover the works of one of my favourite writers: the poet Mary Oliver.

Long before lockdowns turned solitary strolls into a mainstream hobby, Mary Oliver was a champion of the nature walk. Born and raised in Ohio, she grew up finding comfort in her own company, often slipping away from her difficult home into the shelter of nearby woods. As an adult, she spent most of her life in a small town on the Massachusetts coast, where she lived with her long-term partner, Molly Malone Cook. Oliver wrote poems from a young age; over the course of her life, she became one of America’s greatest and best-loved nature poets.

While over two years have passed since Oliver’s death, her work has, in some ways, never felt more current. Oliver led a deliberately quiet life. She saw beauty in detail and embraced the ritualistic nature of her wanderings, which took her to the same places again and again. Yet judging by the sense of wonder expressed in her poems, she never grew tired of the world around her, however familiar.

This lens through which Oliver understood her environment—and all those living within it— is part of what makes her work so comforting as well as inspiring, especially now. For Oliver, familiarity was no barrier to joy or discovery. Indeed, in many of her poems she addresses her readers directly, exhorting them to look, listen, or imagine. In “Look Again”, for instance, she celebrates the simple toad, “sweet and alive in the sun”: she highlights its gold-rimmed eyes, its warts like “little streams of jewellery”, and even remarks on its nimble digits, commenting “had anyone/ a piano small enough I think the toad could learn/ to play something.” Her poem “How Everything Adores Being Alive”, meanwhile, opens with a question of perspective: “What if you were a beetle?” she asks, “[…] and the whole world in front of you?” 

In this manner, Oliver invites readers to consider more closely and creatively what we perceive as normal or mundane, and to take pleasure even in transitory, fragile moments. Her poetry isn’t mawkish, either—a pragmatic awareness of predator and prey underpins Oliver’s writing, as evidenced in pieces like “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field”. “Maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,” muses Oliver as the white owl strikes, “but so much light wrapping itself around us —”

For all Oliver’s poetry frequently focuses on animals and nature, it is arguably the emotional wisdom and empathy present in her writing that has rendered it so loved. Poems like “Sleeping in the Forest” and “Wild Geese”, for example, combine Oliver’s signature reverence for nature with epiphanies about the individual dissolving into the wider world and thereby finding their place within it. “Wild Geese” in particular speaks to feelings of isolation with its famous lines “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you […] announcing your place in the family of things.” One of Oliver’s most personal poems, “Flare”, meanwhile, is a gift to anyone seeking to move forward following conflict or loss.

I have found Oliver’s words particularly resonant during lockdown. Her writing opened a door to the outside world when I was self-isolating after a housemate tested positive for the coronavirus; her observations accompany me as I wander through subdued, frosty parks, encouraging me to admire the vivacity of the world even in the grey of a winter lockdown. Her poems are also bite-sized and accessible, making them perfect reading for shortened attention spans. 

Oliver’s writing is also inspiring for its commemoration of her almost 50-year relationship with her partner. Oliver and Cook were devoted to one another; however, as Oliver writes fondly in her poetry and prose collection Long Life, the pair “plagued each other with our differences.” Nevertheless, for all their divergent interests, Oliver ultimately describes their differences as a tonic. “The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together,” she concludes. With highlights including poems like “The Whistler”, which depicts the thrill of discovering new facets of a person even after living with them for decades, Oliver’s writing takes a compassionate view of interpersonal relationships—making for gentle, empathetic lockdown reading. 

Oliver once wrote “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is”—but that she did know was to pay attention. Indeed, she spent a lifetime cultivating a practice of perceiving the sacred in the ordinary, whether this involved carrying a snake into the garden or cupping a fieldmouse in the purse of her hands. Her writing thus evokes the senses and is perhaps most remarkable for its capacity to convey ecstasy and joy. 

“I walk in the world to love it,” she explains in Long Life. She adds to the reader, “You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotions.” 

In a time when the world often feels bleak or muted, hers is a voice I choose to listen to. 

READERS DIGEST

I Don't Want to Live a Small Life by Mary Oliver

 

I DON'T WANT TO LIVE A SMALL LIFE

by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver / No quiero vivir una vida pequeña

I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes,

open your hands. I have just come

from the berry fields, the sun

kissing me with its golden mouth all the way

(open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds

following along thinking perhaps I might

feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes

only to you. Look how many small

but so sweet and maybe the last gift

I will bring to anyone in this

world of hope and risk, so do

Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.

(Red Bird: Poems, Beacon Press, 2008)

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

    

THE SUMMER DAY

by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver / Día de verano

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The Fish by Mary Oliver

 

The Fish 

by Mary Oliver

 Mary Oliver / El pez

The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.

 

The Uses of Sorrow by Mary Oliver

 

THE USES OF SORROW

by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver / Los usos del dolor

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

Hurricane by Mary Oliver

 

HURRICANE

by Mary Oliver

It didn't behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn't stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn't
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
which is what I dream of for me.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

 

THE JOURNEY

by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver / El viaje

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations –
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Wilde Geese by Mary Oliver

 

 

Illustration by Afarin Sajedi

 Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver / Gansos salvajes

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Singapore by Mary Oliver

 

SINGAPORE

by Mary Oliver

In Singapore, in the airport,

a darkness was ripped from my eyes.

In the woman restroom, one compartment stood open.

A woman knelt there, washing something

in the white bowl.

Disgust argued in my stomach

and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

A poem should always have birds in it.

Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.

Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.

A waterfall, or if that is not possible, a fountain

rising and falling.

A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.

Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and

neither could win.

She smiled and smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?

Everybody needs a job.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,

which is dull enough.

She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as

hubcaps, with a blue rag.

Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.

She does not work slowly, nor quickly, but like a river.

Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

I don´t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.

And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop

and fly down to the river.

This probably won´t happen.

But maybe it will.

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course it isn’t.

Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only

the light that can shine out of a life. I mean

the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,

the way her smile was only for my sake; I mean

the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

Morning Poem by Mary Oliver

 

MORNING POEM

by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver / Poema matutino

Every morning 

the world 

is created. 

Under the orange

sticks of the sun 

the heaped 

ashes of the night 

turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches— 

and the ponds appear 

like black cloth 

on which are painted islands

of summer lilies. 

If it is your nature 

to be happy 

you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination 

alighting everywhere. 

And if your spirit 

carries within it

the thorn 

that is heavier than lead— 

if it's all you can do 

to keep on trudging—

there is still 

somewhere deep within you 

a beast shouting that the earth 

is exactly what it wanted—

each pond with its blazing lilies 

is a prayer heard and answered 

lavishly, 

every morning,

whether or not 

you have ever dared to be happy, 

whether or not 
you have ever dared to pray.