When the poet Mary Oliver passed in her 83rd year on January 17, 2019, the huge response revealed her as one of the most popular writers of our time. That despite her refusal to be famous or rich, and the rare interviews she gave. She wanted her poems to speak for themselves and came up with titles such as Owls and Other Fantasies, The Leaf and the Cloud, Wild Geese and the Truro Bear.
A dear friend wrote to me: âI canât think of a contemporary poet who better than Oliver expresses such depth of feeling and thought about the natural world, and what it is to experience earth as an animal in the web of life. And I like the fact that her work is accessible and has reached a large audience.â
Mary Oliverâs poems arrived where I now live on the edge of a meadow in Oak and Madrone woodlands in Northern California, as I am trying to read and understand the unprecedented changes of the last 20 years in the ecology around me.
Mary Oliver gave two of her rare readings at the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They are a family foundation dedicated to support contemporary artists and writers, and rural indigenous communities.
Among the poems Mary Oliver is hears reading on this program are: The Fish, Wild Geese, One-hundred White Sided Dolphins on a Summer Day, I Found a Dead Fox, and Who made the world? Her many immensely popular books include: Red Bird, A Thousand Mornings, Dog Songs, and Blue Horses.
Iâm acknowledging the Lannan Foundation for excerpts from the August 4, 2001, reading by Mary Oliver - and for a short quote from an interview by Joseph Parisi with her from October 25, 2006. Parisi is former Editor in Chief of Poetry magazine.
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