Mary Oliver
One of America’s best-loved poets wrote about geese, ponds and attention – and shared her life for over forty years with photographer Molly Malone Cook.
Mary Oliver grew up near Cleveland, Ohio, in a difficult home; she later spoke of having been abused as a child, and said she escaped into the woods and into writing. At 17 she visited the home of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and stayed for several years, helping Millay’s sister sort her papers.
There, in the late 1950s, she met the photographer Molly Malone Cook. The two became a couple and lived together for over forty years, most of that time in Provincetown on Cape Cod, where Oliver walked every day with a notebook in her pocket. Cook died in 2005; Oliver wrote movingly about her loss.
Her poems speak with simple, clear words of animals, plants, water and light, of attention as a form of prayer. “American Primitive” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, and “New and Selected Poems” the National Book Award in 1992. Poems such as “Wild Geese” and “The Summer Day” are among the most quoted in the English language. She became one of the best-selling poets in American history.
She died in Florida in 2019, aged 83.