Beloved Pulitzer-winning poet Mary Oliver has died at 83 (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019)

Sad to hear that the prolific poet Mary Oliver, died on Thursday aged  83 from lymphoma cancer at her home in Hobe Sound, Florida.
Mary won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her collection of poems American Primitive. Her works included White Pine, West Wind and the 2017 anthology Devotions.Among the other accolades she received during the course of her illustrious career, she was also awarded the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems in 1992, as well as the Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement in 1998.
She was born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio, where she often found escape from a difficult childhood walking in the woods.She attended Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not graduate from either institution. In 1953, at the age of 17, she visited Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She would eventually become friends with the poet’s sister and lived there for several years, organizing Millay’s papers; it was there in the late 1950s that she met photographer, Molly Malone Cook,who became her life partner and literary agent for over 40 years until she died in 2005.She dedicated much of her work to Molly over the years.

In more than 15 collections of poetry and other works of prose, Oliver’s writing focused on the one thing we all have in common: We are all, inherently, part of the Earth we call home. That understanding was part of what made her writing so accessible and profound. Urging us to pay attention to nature for inspiration is something that, in our plugged-in and always-on society, made Oliver especially relevant. She wrote about human mortality with the tone of someone counting her blessings.Her view of death;   and what a worthwhile life should feel like, was summed up in her much-loved 1992 poem, The Summer Day. First published in 1992, it’s a pointed and potent reminder not to take for granted “your one wild and precious life.”

The Summer Day

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?

One of Oliver’s most famous poems was “Wild Geese,” which I post below. and include a video of her reading it. In it, Oliver offers reassurance and gives us permission to be ourselves.

Wild Geese

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 your 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.

Mary Oliver was a hugely influential and urgently necessary poet  including countless readers to whom poetry as an institution was often inaccessible or opaque. I will end this post with the followng poem from her pen, which acts as  a kind of epitaph. R.I.P Mary Oliver, your words  live on and will continue to bring comfort, joy and respite to many.

When death comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

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.