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Mary Oliver (1935 –) is an American poet.
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Life
Mary Oliver was born September 10, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio. As a teenager, she lived for a brief while in the home of the recently-deceased Edna St. Vincent Millay, where she helped Millay's sister Norma organize the papers Millay left behind. Oliver briefly attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950's, but did not receive a degree. She has resided in Provincetown, Massachusetts for over forty years. Her late partner, artist Molly Malone Cook, served as Oliver's literary agent until her death in 2005.
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Career
An intense and joyful observer of the natural world, Oliver is often compared to Whitman and Thoreau. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon. Maxine Kumin calls Oliver "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms" and "an indefatigable guide to the natural world." Honors Oliver has received include the National Book Award (1992), the Pulitzer Prize (1984), and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1980).
References
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 193: American Poets Since World War II, Sixth Series. Ed. Joseph Conte, State University of New York, Buffalo. The Gale Group, 1998. pp. 227-233.
Kumin, Maxine. "Intimations of Mortality." Women's Review of Books 10:7, April 1993, p.16.
Oliver, Mary. Long Life: Essays and Other Writings. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004.
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Bibliography
No Voyage, and Other Poems (1963, first edition; 1965, expanded edition)
The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems (1972)
The Night Traveler (1978)
Sleeping in the Forest (1979, poetry chapbook)
American Primitive (1983)
Provincetown (1987, limited edition with woodcuts by Barnard Taylor)
New and Selected Poems (1992)
White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems (1994)
West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems (1997)
Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998)
Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999)
The Leaf and the Cloud (2000, prose poem)
Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays (2003)
New and Selected Poems, volume two (2004)
Why I Wake Early: New Poems (2004)
Blue Iris: Poems and Essays (2004)
Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (2004)
At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver (2006, audio cd)
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