Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver
Mary Oliveris an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times described her as "far and away, this country's best-selling poet."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth10 September 1935
CityMaple Heights, OH
CountryUnited States of America
humble cherish heaviness
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
dog grief giving
And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old-or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.
crafts poet interest
A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course.
life disaster wells
Life is much the same when it's going well-- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?
dream song heart
Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.
opportunity knows
You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
want precious-life
Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?
ambition home wonderful
All my life I have been restless-- I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss-- than wholeness-- than staying at home.
ideas afternoon may
A fact: one picks it up and reads it, and puts it down, and there is an end to it. But an idea! That one may pick up, and reflect upon, and oppose, and expand, and so pass a delightful afternoon altogether.
culture creatures
All culture developed as some wild, raw creature strived to live better and longer.
somewhere-else water want
It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
looks hook
I took one look and fell, hook and tumble.
writing heart skills
Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.
moving fall voice
Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.