Remembering Poet Mary Oliver
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
That question, posed at the end of Mary Oliver's poem, "The Summer Day," resonated with readers around the world and made Oliver as close to a household name as any modern-day poet in recent memory.
Oliver died on January 17, 2019 at age 83. She had a long and celebrated career: In 1984, she won a Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive; in 1992, she won the National Book Award in 1992 for her New and Selected Poems. Poems in her newer collections, Felicity and Devotions, cover familiar ground—beauty, spirituality, and the natural world—and also offer glimpses of humor and lightness that characterized much her work. She also wrote freely about death, particularly in the work published since the 2005 death of her partner of 40 years, Molly Malone Cook.
Oliver was best known for her poetry, but she wrote essays as well. Upstream, published only a few years ago, spans 25 years of her prose and acts almost as a memoir. And she defied convention in compilations like The Truro Bear and Other Adventures, which includes both essays and poems—including several about her dog Percy, who popped up in much of her work over the years.
All her work shares a certain clarity, a deftness with language that makes her poems easy to read and understand as well as deeply meaningful. If you've never read Mary Oliver's work before, you can start by reading a selection her poems for free online via the Poetry Foundation. Then, check out collections of her poetry and essays from the Library.
More Oliver links
- Episode 98 of NYPL's The Librarian Is In podcast, in which we read "Wild Geese" and talk about Oliver's work
- A recording of "Tides," part of The New York Public Library's 30 Days of Poetry
- Book Riot's reading pathway for people looking for a place to start
- Her obituary in Lithub, NPR, and the New York Times
One final Oliver poem
“In Blackwater Woods," from Upstream :
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
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Image credits: "Don't Worry" from Felicity (top) and a sign in Concord, Massachusetts taken by Sara Beth Joren.
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