Mary Oliver, who won the National Book Award (1992, New and Selected Poems) and Pulitzer Prize (1984, American Primitive) for her poems which celebrated the natural world, spirituality, and self, has died of lymphoma at 83 at her home in Hobe Sound, Florida.
Wrote NPR: ‘Oliver got a lot of her ideas for poems during long walks — a habit she developed as a kid growing up in rural Ohio. It was not a happy childhood: She said she was sexually abused and suffered from parental neglect. But as she told NPR in 2012, she found refuge in two great passions that lasted her entire life. She said, “The two things I loved from a very early age were the natural world and dead poets, [who] were my pals when I was a kid.”‘
The NYT added: ‘Ms. Oliver, whose work appeared often in The New Yorker and other magazines, was a phenomenon: a poet whose work sold strongly. Her books frequently appeared on the best-seller list of the Poetry Foundation, which uses data from Nielsen BookScan, a service that tracks book sales, putting her on a par with Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States, as one of the best-selling poets in the country.’
Oliver moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts in the 1960s “with the love of her life, the photographer Molly Malone Cook,” as NPR noted, and much of her poetry celebrated the natural beauty of the outer Cape.
Her poem “The Journey”, in full.
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.
