Review
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It has always seemed, across her 15 books of poetry,
five of prose and several essays and chapbooks, that Mary Oliver
might leave us at any minute. Even a 1984 Pulitzer Prize couldn't
pin her to the ground. She'd change quietly into a heron or a
bear and fly or walk on forever. —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los
Angeles Times
"Oliver's poetry is of the Earth, and about the Earth, and as
these poems give voice to the planet, they render human life more
beautiful, more sentient, more meaningful." —Karen McCarthy,
ForeWord
"These are life-enhancing and redemptive poems that coax the
sublime from the subliminal." —Sally Connolly, Poetry
"Mary's Oliver poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing.
Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural
world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations."
—Stanley Kunitz
"Oliver's poems are thoroughly convincing—as genuine, moving, and
implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring." —New York
Times Book Review
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About the Author
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A private person by nature, Mary Oliver (1935–2019)
gave very few interviews over the years. Instead, she preferred
to let her work speak for itself. And speak it has, for the past
five decades, to countless readers. The New York Times recently
acknowledged Mary Oliver as “far and away, this country’s
best-selling poet.” Born in a small town in Ohio, Oliver
published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28; No
Voyage and Other Poems, originally printed in the UK by Dent
Press, was reissued in the United States in 1965 by Houghton
Mifflin. Oliver has since published twenty books of poetry and
six books of prose. As a young woman, Oliver studied at Ohio
State University and Vassar College, but took no degree. She
lived for several years at the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay in
upper New York state, companion to the poet’s sister Norma
Millay. It was there, in the late ’50s, that she met photographer
Molly Malone Cook. For more than forty years, Cook and Oliver
made their home together, largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts,
where they lived until Cook’s death in 2005. Over the course of
her long and illustrious career, Oliver has received numerous
awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry in 1984. She has also received the Shelley
Memorial Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award; the Christopher
Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of
Light; the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems; a
Lannan Foundation Literary Award; and the New England Booksellers
Association Award for Literary Excellence. Oliver’s essays have
appeared in Best American Essays 1996, 1998, 2001; the Anchor
Essay Annual 1998, as well as Orion, Onearth and other
periodicals. Oliver was editor of Best American Essays 2009.
Oliver’s books on the craft of poetry, A Poetry Handbook and
Rules for the Dance, are used widely in writing programs. She is
an acclaimed reader and has read in practically every state as
well as other countries. She has led workshops at various
colleges and universities, and held residencies at Case Western
Reserve University, Bucknell University, University of
Cincinnati, and Sweet Briar College. From 1995, for five years,
she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished
Teaching at Bennington College. She has been awarded Honorary
Doctorates from The Art Institute of Boston (1998), Dartmouth
College (2007) and Tufts University (2008).
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