Undaunted by whatever vicissitudes life hurled at her, poet Mary Oliver found joy and amazement everywhere she looked. Her singular talent was her ability to communicate what she found in simple, unadorned, unpretentious verse that struck a chord with virtually anyone who read her poetry.
Even as I write, her passing is being mourned in obituaries that hallow her memory far beyond my poor powers to add or detract...
The Washington Post :
“Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose lyrical descriptions of the lamp-eyed owl, the white-toothed bear and the lilies by the pond evoked natural wonders with a startling clarity of vision, while suggesting that life was a matter of learning to love the world even in the face of ugliness and pain, died Jan. 17 at her home in Hobe Sound, Fla. She was 83.”
The New York Times :
“For her abiding communion with nature, Ms. Oliver was often compared to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. For her quiet, measured observations, and for her fiercely private personal mien (she gave many readings but few interviews, saying she wanted her work to speak for itself), she was likened to Emily Dickinson. . .
Ms. Oliver often described her vocation as the observation of life, and it is clear from her texts that she considered the vocation a quasi-religious one. Her poems — those about nature as well as those on other subjects — are suffused with a pulsating, almost mystical spirituality, as in the work of the American Transcendentalists or English poets like William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
NPR :
“Oliver lived for many years in Provincetown, Mass., with the love of her life, the photographer Molly Malone Cook. There, she continued her habit of taking long walks, which often inspired poems. She wrote about one such walk in her poem ‘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?”
The Guardian :
“Like her hero Walt Whitman, whom she would call the brother she never had, Oliver didn’t only observe mushrooms growing in a rainstorm or an owl calling from a black branch; she longed to know and become one with what she saw. She might be awed by the singing of goldfinches or, as in the poem ‘White Flowers’, overcome by a long nap in a field.
‘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 wrote of her in the New York Times.”
It seems everyone has their own favorite Mary Oliver poems or quotes…
These four lines from her poem “Sometimes” are mine:
"Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it."