OLIVER, Mary

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Nationality: American. Born: Maple Heights, Ohio, 10 September 1935. Education: Ohio State University, Columbus, 1955–56; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, 1956–57. Career: Chair of the Writing Department, 1972–73, and member of the writing committee, 1984, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts; Mather Visiting Professor, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 1980, 1982; poet-in-residence, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, 1986, and University of Cincinnati, Ohio, 1986; Banister Writer-in-Residence, Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar, Virginia, 1991–95; William Blackburn visiting professor, Duke University, 1995. Since 1996 Catharine Osgood Foster Professor, Bennington College. Awards: Poetry Society of American prize, 1962, Shelley memorial award, 1970, and Alice Fay di Castagnola award, 1973; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1972; Guggenheim fellowship, 1980; American Academy award, 1983; Pulitzer Prize, 1984; Christopher award for House of Light, 1991; L.L. Winship award for House of Light, 1991; National Book award for Poetry for New and Selected Poems, 1992. Agent: Molly Malone Cook Literary Agency, P.O. Box 619, Provincetown, Massachusetts 02657, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

No Voyage and Other Poems. London, Dent, 1963; revised edition, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1972.

The Night Traveler. Cleveland, Bits Press, 1978.

Twelve Moons. Boston, Little Brown, 1979.

Sleeping in the Forest. Athens, Ohio Review Chapbook, 1979.

American Primitive. Boston, Little Brown, 1983.

Dream Work. Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.

House of Light. Boston, Beacon Press, 1990.

New and Selected Poems. Boston, Beacon Press, 1992.

White Pine. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1994.

Blue Pastures. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1995.

West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Other

A Poetry Handbook. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1994.

Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical

Verse. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

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Critical Studies: "The Poetry of Mary Oliver: Modern Renewal through Mortal Acceptance" by Jean B. Alford, in Pembroke (Pembroke, North Carolina), 20, 1988; "Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry" by Janet McNew, in Contemporary Literature (Madison, Wisconsin), 30(1), spring 1989; "Dialogues between History and Dream" by Lisa M. Steinman, in Michigan Quarterly Review (Ann Arbor, Michigan), 26(2), spring 1987; 'Voices the Heart Can Hear': From Silence to Voice in the Poetry of Mary Oliver (dissertation) by Janet Lee Warman, University of Tennessee, 1991; "The Language of Nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver" by Diane S. Bonds, in Women's Studies (New York), 21(1), 1992; "Moore, Bishop, and Oliver: Thinking Back, Re-Seeing the Sea," in Twentieth Century Literature (Albany, New York), 39(3), fall 1993, and "The Native American Presence in Mary Oliver's Poetry," in Kentucky Review (Lexington, Kentucky), 12(1–2), autumn 1993, both by Robin Riley Fast; "Mary Oliver, Poetic Iconographer" by Joan Mellard, in Language and Literature (San Antonio, Texas), 16, 1991; Journeys into the Border Country: The Making of Nature and Home in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers and Mary Oliver (dissertation) by Kirk Dade Glaser, University of California, Berkeley, 1993; "'Into the Body of Another': Mary Oliver and the Poetics of Becoming Other" by Vicki Graham, in Papers on Language and Literature (Edwardsville, Illinois), 30(4), fall 1994; "Nature, Spirit, and Imagination in the Poetry of Mary Oliver" by Douglas Burton Christie, in Cross Currents (New Rochelle, New York), 46(1), spring 1996; "Mary Oliver: The Poet and the Persona" by Sue Russell, in Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, 4(4), fall 1997; "Hurry Up or Wait: Oliver's 'Going to Walden'" by John Chamberlain, in Thoreau Society Bulletin (Lincoln, Massachusetts), 225, fall 1998.

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life's winners are not the rapacious but the patient:
what triumphs and takes new territory
 
has learned to lie for centuries in the shadows
like the shadows of the rocks.

Mary Oliver did not lie in the shadows for centuries before receiving the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1984. She has been a quiet, modest poet, however, one whose work reflects a pastoral life lived (first in Ohio, then in Provincetown) with plants and animals far more than with human beings. Her early work was reviewed by both Philip Booth and Joyce Carol Oates as being influenced by Robert Frost, and, as with Frost, her first book, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in England.

Like Frost, she has migrated to a home in New England, whose landscape dominates the poetry in both Twelve Moons and American Primitive. She is also like her mentor in being anything but the "primitive" that her work guilefully suggests. In fact, if one thinks of the tradition in American letters created by Thoreau—the man who talked about the value of independence, self-subsistence, and a life connected with the land while in fact, as Leon Edel points out, he lived in a cabin close enough to his mother's house to enable him to go there every day for home-baked cookies and other things he did not care to provide for himself—then we can see Oliver as part of this tradition. Her poems enrich the fantasy life of Americans who read the L.L. Bean catalogues and dress for hunting, hiking, and the outdoor life, while in fact they never face the hardships that are part of such a life. Reading Oliver's poetry gives the same wonderful, vicarious satisfaction. Her knowledge of plants and animals is so rich that no one could question its authenticity. But it is presented in beautiful and not realistic images: (speaking of raccoons) "walking, / silvery, slumberous, / each a sharp set of teeth, / each a grey dreamer"; (hibernating snakes) "and their eyes are like jewels— / and asleep, though they cannot close. / And in each mouth the forked tongue, / sensitive as an angel's ear"; (about being in a swamp) "I feel / not so much wet as / painted and glittered / with the fat grassy / mires, the rich / and succulent marrows / of earth." She writes of egrets in this way:

Even half-asleep they had
  such faith in the world
that had made them—
  tilting through the water,
  	unruffled, sure,
  	   by the laws
of their faith not logic,
  they opened their wings
  	softly and stepped
  	  over every dark thing

Thus no one ever experiences fear, pain, frustration, or being out of control, all the miseries we urbanized creatures usually feel in the wilderness. Oliver's poetry gives each reader the illusion that the natural world is graspable, controllable, and beautiful. In addition, the reader feels that she is facing truth and reality, all of the struggles she knows are out there.

This vision of gentleness and possibility, that the natural world is obtainable and belongs to anyone who simply opens his or her eyes, comes from Thoreau through Frost, and it is one that only a few other contemporary poets have grappled with. (Perhaps Maxine Kumin would be an example of a poet who works in this mode.) Oliver's poems, however, have been compared by Robert DeMott to those of Roethke and Galway Kinnell, saying that all three poets are "sensitive to visitations by the 'dark things' of the wood." But if Oliver writes of "dark things," they are friendly, benevolent dark things. Even her vision of death is gentle, pastoral, and haunting rather than fearful and violent. What the critics seem to be pointing out is that there is alive today in American poetry a strain of writing that glorifies man's natural relationship to animals, plants, and the nonhuman world. It seems to be a necessary vision, one in which beauty and simplicity, achieved through a nonviolent portrait of nature's ecosystems, could replace nuclear holocaust. Oliver writes this vision clearly, persuasively, and with natural elegance.

—Diane Wakoski