Mary Oliver

 Mary Oliver looked at a landscape through a poetic lens. She watched the small changes in a pond with “risen lilies” and the ocean “galloping in the pitch” as well as when the ocean’s “salted waves with their soft, untroubled faces” gazed toward the shore.

She lived for years in Provincetown, MA where the ocean, dunes, shore fed her imagination. Where she lived with her partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook. When Molly was ill with cancer Mary Oliver spent her days taking care of Molly and at night went outside, sat on a bench and wrote poetry — with a flashlight for light.

Mary Oliver was out as a lesbian before it became acceptable. She was who she was without any excuses and her love poems—both personal, and beautiful celebrate love. She and Molly Malone Cook shared that love for forty years until Molly’s death.

Mary spent months culling through Molly’s photographs for a book that is both an eulogy and a celebration. Our World is a memoir and a deeply felt look at their love for one another. It is filled with Molly’s photographs. 

Oliver relates how they met in the Edna St. Vincent Millay kitchen at Steepletop —“ I took one look and fell , hook and tumble.”

Mary Oliver will be missed. Her careful eye for the details of nature will be missed. 

In her book, Rules for the Dance,  for poets and those who either want to read poetry or begin to write poetry she writes: “ Can you find words to make some living inch of the world vigorous, breathy, fibrous? Upon such bright straws the weight of your work leans. As with any enterprise, practice will make you better.”

And when she writes about other poets she writes about herself.

      “...Poets have, in freedom and in prison, in health and in misery, with listeners and without listeners, spent their lives examining and glorifying life, meditation, thoughtfulness, devoutness, and human love. They have done this wildly, serenely, rhetorically, lyrically, without hope of answer or reward. They have done this grudgingly, willingly, patiently, and in the steams of impatience.

       They have done it for all and any of the gods of life, and the record of their doing so doing belongs to each one of us.

       Including you.”

Rest In Peace , Mary Oliver.