For her quiet, measured observations, and for her fiercely private personal mien (she gave many readings but few interviews, saying she wanted her work to speak for itself), she was likened to Emily Dickinson. Oliver was often compared to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. My dog returns and barks fiercely, he saysĮach secret body is the richest advisor ,įor her abiding communion with nature, Ms. My dog runs off, noses down packed leaves In “Spring,” here in its entirety, she wrote: Read on one level, these poems are sensualist still lifes: Often set in and around the woods, marshes and tide pools of Provincetown, Mass., where she lived for more than 40 years, they offer impeccable descriptions of the land and its nonhuman tenants in a spare, formally conservative, conversational style. Oliver was occupied with intimate observations of flora and fauna, as many of her titles - “Mushrooms,” “Egrets,” “The Swan,” “The Rabbit,” “The Waterfall” - attest. Oliver, fairly late in life, the aura of a reluctant, bookish rock star. It was this, combined with their relative brevity, that seemed to endear her work to a broad public, including clerics, who quoted it in their sermons poetry therapists, who found its uplifting sensibility well suited to their work composers, like Ronald Perera and Augusta Read Thomas, who set it to music and celebrities like Laura Bush and Maria Shriver.Īll this, combined with the throngs that turned out for her public readings, conspired to give Ms. Her poems, which are built of unadorned language and accessible imagery, have a pedagogical, almost homiletic quality. 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, whose work appeared often in The New Yorker and other magazines, was a phenomenon: a poet whose work sold strongly.
She won a National Book Award in 1992 for “New and Selected Poems,” published by Beacon Press. Oliver received a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her collection “American Primitive,” published by Little, Brown & Company. Oliver had been treated for lymphoma, which was first diagnosed in 2015.Ī prolific writer with more than 20 volumes of verse to her credit, Ms. Her literary executor, Bill Reichblum, confirmed the death. Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work, with its plain language and minute attention to the natural world, drew a wide following while dividing critics, died on Thursday at her home in Hobe Sound, Fla.
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