Mary Oliver

Biography

Mary Oliver (1935 – 2019) was the author of more than fifteen collections of poetry, including Blue Horses (Penguin, 2014); New and Selected Poems, Volume One (Beacon, 1992), which won the National Book Award; House of Light (Beacon, 1990), which won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award; and American Primitive (Little, Brown, 1983), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Her honors include an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.



 

See Work

POETRY / Autumn 1987

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

By Mary Oliver

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning

POETRY / Autumn 1987

The Lilies Break Open Over The Dark Water

By Mary Oliver

Inside
 that mud-hive, that gas-sponge,
  that reeking
   leaf-yard, that rippling

POETRY / Winter 1995

White Pine

By Mary Oliver

      The sun rises late in this Southern county. And, since the first thing I do when I wake up is go out into the world, I walk here along a dark road. There are many trees. Also, shrubs and vines—sumac, the ivies, honeysuckle.

POETRY / Winter 1995

March

By Mary Oliver

        There isn’t anything in this world but mad love. Not in this world. No tame love, calm love, mild love, no so-so love. And of course, no reasonable love. There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier. But, who wants...

POETRY / Summer 1991

The Pinewoods

By Mary Oliver

This morning
   two deer
      in the pinewoods,
         in the five a.m. mist,

in a silky agitation,
   went leaping
      down into the shadows

POETRY / Winter 1982

White Night

By Mary Oliver

All night
 I float
   in the shallow ponds
    while the moon wanders

burning,
 bone white,
   among the milky stems.

POETRY / Summer 1991

When Death Comes

By Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from
    his purse

POETRY / Winter 1984

A Death

By Mary Oliver

Afterwards
the cheerful birds
still woke me—bands
of crows blaring,

and the darling sparrows
chirping for their lives.
Somebody had died.

POETRY / Spring 1999

Three Prose Poems

By Mary Oliver

Oh, yesterday, that one, we all cry out. Oh, that one! How rich and possible everything was! How ripe, ready, lavish, and filled with excitement—how hopeful we were on those summer days, under the clean, white racing clouds.

POETRY / Winter 1984

The River

By Mary Oliver

Just because I was born
precisely here or there,
in some cold city or other,
don’t think I don’t remember
how I came along like a grain
carried by the flood—