Mary Oliver is a prolific writer of poetry and prose, focusing her themes on her poignant and clear observations of nature, the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the mystery and wonder of such. Her verse lays emphasis on all the occurrences of nature, such as the motionless ponds, the old oaks, the egrets, the lean owls, the industrious hummingbirds, etc. She is taken by Maxine Kumin in Women’s Review of Books as an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” who “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.”[1] One of the astonishing aspects of Oliver’s poetry and prose is the consistency of tone over the past five decades. As one of the best-selling and most celebrated poets in America, Stephen Dobyns commented in New York Times Book Review, “What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets. . . .There is no complaint in Ms. Oliver’s poetry, no whining, but neither is there the sense that life is in any way easy.”[2] Oliver describes her passion and love for both the human and the nonhuman that she has been familiar with for a long period of time in her plain and visionary language. Born in a small town Maple Heights, Ohio, on September 10, 1935, Oliver attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but received no degree from either institution. She lived at the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay for several years in upper New York State, helping the poet’s sister Norma Millay sort through the papers left behind, and also it’s where she met photographer Molly Malone Cook, and later published her first book of poetry No Voyage and Other Poems in 1963 at the age of 28. Originally printed in the UK by Dent Press, the book was reissued in the United States in 1965 by Houghton Mifflin. For more than forty years, Oliver and Cook made their home together, largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, until Cook’s death in 2005, and the landscape of the surrounding Cape Cod has had great influences on the poet’s works

[1] Kumin, Maxine. “Intimations of Mortality.” Women’s Review of Books 10: 7 (April. 1993): 16.

[2] Dobyns, Stephen, “How Does One Live?” New York Book Review. (13 Dec. 1992): 12.

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