Mary Oliver (1935 - )

Mary Oliver was born in 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio. She now lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts. At one time she was a secretary for Edna St. Vincent Millay's sister, and there is some evidence of Millay's influence in Oliver's early poetry. Her writing has few human subjects, but she draws us into her humanity through her acute focus on nature and her precision with language.

She is the author of several volumes of poetry, including Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999); West Wind (1997); White Pine (1994); New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award; House of Light (1990); and American Primitive (1983), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.

Oliver has also written three books: Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998), Blue Pastures (1995), and A Poetry Handbook (1994).

Olivers's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1980-1981) and from the National Endowment of the Arts (1972-1973). She has also received an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize.

The poems are by default sorted according to volume, but you can also choose to sort them alphabetically or by page views.

First Line	Comments
"Make of yourself a light"	1 Comment
1
1	1 Comment
1.	1 Comment
All my life,	1 Comment
All night
All summer
All summer I made friends
And I have seen,
And now as the iron rinds over	1 Comment
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled	2 Comments
At Great Pond
Blue and dark-blue
Chunky and noisy,
Cold now.	1 Comment
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?	2 Comments
Don't call this world adorable, or useful, that's not it.	2 Comments
Every day
Every morning	3 Comments
Every summer	3 Comments
Have you ever seen	2 Comments
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
He picks his pond, and the soft thicket of his world.
Hello, sun in my face.	2 Comments
His beak could open a bottle,
How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout	1 Comment
I am watching the white gannets
I have been thinking	1 Comment
I thought the earth remembered me,	5 Comments
I tied together
I used to imagine him	1 Comment
In April
In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.	1 Comment
In the afternoon I watched	1 Comment
It fills you with the soft	3 Comments
It is possible, I suppose that sometime
It was spring
Last night	1 Comment
Last night, an owl	1 Comment
Listen, whatever it is you try	1 Comment
Mushrooms
My father, for example,
Needing one, I invented her -
Next time what I'd do is look at	2 Comments
Night after night	1 Comment
Now I see it--
Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!	1 Comment
Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,	2 Comments
On a summer morning
On winter’s margin, see the small birds now	1 Comment
Once, in summer
One day you finally knew	10 Comments
Out of the sump rise the marigolds.	1 Comment
Over the local stations, one by one,	2 Comments
She sends me news of blue jays, frost,	1 Comment
She steps into the dark swamp	3 Comments
So heavy	1 Comment
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
Something	2 Comments
That sweet flute John Clare;
The dark things of the wood
The first fish	4 Comments
The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
The mosquito is so small
The oaks shone
The spirit	2 Comments
There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,	1 Comment
There’s a bear in the Truro woods.
There’s a kind of white moth, I don’t know
This morning
This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready	2 Comments
Three miles through the woods	1 Comment
Under the leaves, under	4 Comments
We enter
We must begin to catch hold of everything
What is so utterly invisible
What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw.
When death comes	15 Comments
When the blackberries hang	1 Comment
Where the path closed	4 Comments
Whispering to each handhold, "I'll be back,"	1 Comment
Who doesn’t love
Who made the world?	4 Comments
You can
You do not have to be good.	3 Comments