Mary Oliver, Poet – Exposing Nature’s Largest Truth

This is not an impartial article about the poet Mary Oliver. I’ve been a fan of her work since the first time I read it almost fifteen years ago. I still often choose one of her many books of poetry on the table next to my comfy chair, encourage the pages to fall open randomly, and let her words repair the warp of tension that happens from everyday life. Usually when I come to the final line of a Mary Oliver poem, my lungs inhale a deep breath and my shoulder muscles, which I didn’t realize were clinched, relax. More than that, though, her poems ask me how I’m going to answer one of Life’s most important questions: What matters, now that we’re living?

Mary Oliver was born on September 10, 1935, near Cleveland, Ohio. She wrote her first poem when she was fourteen and three years later she visited the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the late Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner, in upper New York State. For several years afterward, she spent most of her time there, assisting Millay’s sister with organizing the late poet’s writings and papers and exploring the 800 acre property. Her first collection of poems, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963. In 1984, her fifth published book of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She and photographer Molly Malone Cook, her partner of more than 40 years who passed away in 2005, made their home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Oliver still resides. The awards Mary Oliver has received for her poetry and prose collections are distinguished and extensive. She is recognized as one of America’s best selling poets.

Mary Oliver is protective of her privacy, but, fortunately for her fans, she has a track record of releasing a new collection of poems every year or two. With so many poems, it’s not surprising that one recently carried the title “What Can I Say?”, and the first two lines are “What can I say that I have not said before?/So I’ll say it again.” And in the next 13 lines, she does exactly that, and … what can I say? Once again I’m carried into a world where she helps me remember that I have a place, as a human, among singing leaves, patient stones and forests – with Nature.

In all the many poems and prose composed by Mary Oliver, Nature is the medium as much as the words. Her poems are not genderized, politicized, modernized, sexualized, or radicalized. She doesn’t speak in terms of race, economic stations, or religion. She delves below all those notions to the more elemental level of a human’s existence on Earth, often touching the primal memories of a time, perhaps thousands of years ago, perhaps in our own childhood, when we didn’t see ourselves as separate from Nature. That place can be a place of peace, not the kind of peace that comes from seeing only the soft and fuzzy of a bunny, but also the dirt burrowing, unromantic, unsuccessful dash from the fox. The peace of knowing that Life is large and inclusive, and our time is not to be wasted, and that having questions is part of the answer.

While it’s almost certain that we will ache for wealth and fame, if we’re lucky, from time to time we’ll read Mary Oliver’s poetry and interrupt those thoughtless urges for a moment. Her poetry comes in doses that are not long, but they are potent. She reminds us of Nature’s largest truth; that we each have one life to live within the larger body of Life. Speaking for myself, I’m glad she keeps writing, because I have a tendency to keep forgetting.