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Mary Oliver was born in rural Ohio in 1935. The author of more than 15 collections of poetry and essays, she is one of America's best-selling poets. Among her many honours, she was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive (1983) and a National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, Volume One (1992). She received the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. For four decades, she lived on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with her partner Molly Malone Cook, writing while walking outside with her notebook.
It is no exaggeration to say that she gave me the blueprint, the road map, for the rest of my life. Mary Oliver taught me how to live. -- Steven Petrow * The New York Times * It doesn’t feel like you have to take a seminar in order to understand Mary Oliver’s poetry. She’s speaking directly to you as a human being. -- Ruth Franklin * The New Yorker * [In] so much of her poetry, just a few seemingly simple phrases perfectly express what we need to know just then, in that moment. The symmetry we feel when we are connected, at one with nature and the world. -- Oprah Winfrey Mary Oliver's 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 I learned from Mary Oliver how attention is a kind of love, how shining your mind’s light on a thing – a grasshopper, a bird, a tree – is a way of showing gratitude. I learned that poems do not need to be “difficult” to be intelligent, that poems can be both inspirational and investigative, that poems can be tender without being soft. I learned from her to own my wonder and to stay open to uncertainty. -- Maggie Smith As an atheist, the poetry of Mary Oliver is the closest I come to prayer. -- Andrew McMillan I think we do not have many poets like Oliver, who without apology affirms life everywhere she observes it. -- Maxine Kumin One of the astonishing aspects of Oliver's work is the consistency of tone over this long period. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets [. . .] There is no complaint in Ms. Oliver's poetry, no whining, but neither is there the sense that life is in any way easy [. . .] These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward. -- Stephen Dobyns * The New York Times Book Review * One would have to reach back perhaps to John Clare or Christopher Smart to safely cite a parallel to Oliver's lyricism or radical purification and her unappeasable mania for signs and wonders. -- David Barber * Poetry *
