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Influenced
by William Blake and Walt Whitman, Oliver's poetry can combine
darkness and intense introspection with celebration and joyous
release. She is sometimes compared to Emily Dickinson, with
whom she shares an affinity for solitude and an abiding fascination
with the interior monologues that all of us rehearse throughout
our lives.
The author
of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, Oliver earned
the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature in 1979. She was honored
with the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for her volume
American Primitive, and won the National Book Award in
1992 for New and Selected Poems, a collection covering
nearly 30 years of work. The first and second parts of her
The Leaf and the Cloud were selected for inclusion
in The Best American Poetry 1999 and The Best American
Poetry 2000, respectively.
Oliver
was a working poet long before she was first published. For
years she rose at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning to write for
a few hours before she went off to one of the many mundane
jobs she took to earn a living. "To keep writing was
always a first priority," she has said. Putting words
on paper became a fundamental component of what she calls
her "unstoppable urge" toward the life of the imagination.
Her
poems are grounded in the localities of her life, building
on memories of her native Ohio and experiences in her adopted
home of New England. She now lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts,
spending part of the year in Bennington, Vermont, where she
holds the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished
Teaching at Bennington College. She returned to Cleveland
in 1983 as the Flora Stone Mather Visiting Professor of English
at Case Western Reserve University.
Her
use of relatively unadorned language and accessible forms
makes the revelatory power of her poems all the more passionate.
Vivid images and attention to minute detail convey an almost
palpable sense of physicality, bringing sights, smells, textures,
and sounds to the printed page. An inveterate walker without
destination, Oliver pursues inspiration at a stroller's pace,
stopping frequently in her wanderings to absorb images and
impressions. Walking is part of her poetic process-a process
of discovery, of transmutation and, ultimately, of illumination.
Art, she
has said, is the only medium through which we can live more
lives than our own. In the art that is her poetry, Mary Oliver
brings all of us new lives by expanding our vision and allowing
us to embrace the sensibilities of other times, other places,
and other worlds.
text by
Mark
Gottlieb
Fall 2002
 
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When
Death Comes
When
death comes
like
the hungry bear in autumn;
when
death comes and takes all the bright coins from his
purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when
death comes
like
the measle-pox;
when
death comes
like
an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what
is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as
a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and
I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and
I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as
a field daisy, and as singular,
and
each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending,
as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious
to the earth.
When it's over, 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 it's over, I don't want to wonder
if
I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I
don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or
full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
-
From New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver
Copyright
© 1992 by Mary Oliver
Reprinted
by permission of Beacon Press, Boston
The Buddha's Last Instruction
"Make
of yourself a light,"
said
the Buddha,
before
he died.
I
think of this every morning
as
the east begins
to
tear off its many clouds
of
darkness, to send up the first
signal-a
white fan
streaked
with pink and violet,
even
green.
An
old man, he lay down
between
two sala trees,
and
he might have said anything,
knowing
it was his final hour.
The
light burns upward,
it
thickens and settles over the fields.
Around
him, the villagers gathered
and
stretched forward to listen.
Even
before the sun itself
hangs,
disattached, in the blue air,
I
am touched everywhere
by
its ocean of yellow waves.
No
doubt he thought of everything
that
had happened in his difficult life.
And
then I feel the sun itself
as
it blazes over the hills,
like
a million flowers on fire-
clearly
I'm not needed,
yet
I feel myself turning
into
something of inexplicable value.
Slowly,
beneath the branches,
he
raised his head.
He
looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
-
From House of Light by Mary Oliver
Copyright
© by Mary Oliver
Reprinted
by permission of Beacon Press, Boston
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