Mary Oliver
| Mary Oliver | |
|---|---|
| Born |
September 10, 1935 Maple Heights, Ohio |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable awards |
National Book Award 1984 |
| Partner | Molly Malone Cook |
| Audio | |
|---|---|
 Mary Oliver—Listening to the World, On Being, October 15, 2015 |
|
| Video | |
 Oliver reading at Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on August 4, 2001, video (45 mins) |
National Book Award
1992
Mary Oliver (born September 10, 1935) is an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times described her as "far and away, this country's best-selling poet."
Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. V. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland. Her father was a social studies teacher and an athletics coach in the Cleveland public schools. Oliver began writing poetry at the age of 14. At 17 she visited the home of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Austerlitz, New York, where she then formed a friendship with the late poet's sister Norma. Oliver and Norma spent the next six to seven years at the estate organizing Edna St. Vincent Millay's papers.
Oliver studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s, but did not receive a degree at either college.
You strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do,
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Oliver’s first collection of poems, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963, when she was 28. During the early 1980s, Oliver taught at Case Western Reserve University. Her fifth collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She was Poet In Residence at Bucknell University (1986) and Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College (1991), then moved to Bennington, Vermont, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. She won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for her piece House of Light (1990), and New and Selected Poems (1992) won the National Book Award. Oliver's work turns towards nature for its inspiration and describes the sense of wonder it instills in her. "When it's over," she says, "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 Death Comes" from New and Selected Poems (1992).) Her collections Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), and New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004) build the themes. The first and second parts of Leaf and the Cloud are featured in The Best American Poetry 1999 and 2000, and her essays appear in Best American Essays 1996, 1998 and 2001.
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