It is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world. Is poet Mary Oliver still alive? Years after first reading her as a college student and not relating to her words, rediscovering her was a gift that helped keep me alive. Now that my own trauma wounds are healing, Oliver still provides a model, teaching me to show up, pay attention, and be a voice for what I value in my own life and in the larger world. The Journey' is a poem that focuses on the need to leave behind what is bad and wrong and harmful and start out on a new path. It has become a popular poem for those seeking guidance and strength in their lives. 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.

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But Oliver doesn’t linger with the trauma. The poem continues: “Meanwhile the world goes on./Meanwhile the sun and clear pebbles of the rain/ are moving across the landscapes…” The poem invites us to see our connection to the natural world around us. It also places that “easy” natural scene in relation to “despair.” 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. 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.” Relatable and serene, her poems are of nature. Of the human condition. Of love and loss and of hope.

Prose

Booklist, July, 1994, Pat Monaghan, review of A Poetry Handbook, p. 1916; November 15, 1994, Donna Seaman, review of White Pine, p. 574; June 1, 1997, Donna Seaman, review of West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems, p. 1648; June 1, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse, p. 1708; March 15, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of Winter Hours, p. 1279; September 1, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of The Leaf and the Cloud, p. 58; March 15, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Long Life: Essays and Other Writings, p. 1259. Even if Oliver hadn’t shared in interviews before that she’d been sexually abused as a child, the abuse was right there in her poems, if you looked. The abuse shows up most clearly in Dream Work, the book she wrote after winning the Pulitzer Prize . Dream Work is largely about the devastation of Native American people and culture, and perhaps it was only with the authority gained by winning the country’s biggest poetry prize, and by looking deeply at the suffering and injustice of the place where she lived, that Oliver was able to start to look at and write about her own childhood abuse . In the last few lines, Oliver comes to the main point. She taps on the theme of the futility of life and the inevitability of death. With regards to these themes, she advises us to make the most of this “one wild and precious life”. Her poems are wonderingly perceptive and strongly written, but beyond that they are a spirited, expressive meditation on the impossibili­ties of what we call lives, and on the gratifications of change.” –Hayden Carruth

Dream Work: Poems - DocDroid Dream Work: Poems - DocDroid

On a visit to Austerlitz in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty 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 relocating to Florida. [15] Of Provincetown, she recalled, "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] Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. What type of poet is Mary Oliver? In Dreamwork, however, Mary discovers that merely including herself is not enough. Her self—wounded by abuse, alive to love—demands to be heard just as emphatically as the voice of the crow. She, like the turtle, is “a part of the pond she lives in.” Then I read the 2011 interview with Maria Shriver in O Magazine, in which Mary Oliver said that she’d been sexually abused as a child. and also that it was the first time she’d said that aloud in an interview: “When you’re sexually abused, there’s a lot of damage—that’s the first time I’ve ever said that out loud.”

Photographs

No Voyage, and Other Poems, Dent (New York, NY), 1963, expanded edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1965. i think there is much to be said for difficulty, for ambiguity, for impenetrability; texts that resist the reading experience or experiment with the boundaries of form and style as they exist invite endless reading and re-reading, abundant attention. but i think there's something different but just as substantial to be said for simplicity, for transparency, for the very different kind of diligence that is required to create something that works so entirely alongside the reader, rather than against them, and for the very different kind of devotion in reading and re-reading that it invites.