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玛丽·奥利弗Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. V. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland. She briefly attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s, but did not receive a degree at either college. She was influenced by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and as a teenager, lived for a brief while in her home, where she helped Millay's sister Norma organize the papers the deceased Millay left behind. During the early 1980's, Oliver taught at Case Western Reserve University. In 1984, her collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 1986, she moved to Bucknell University where she was honored with the title "Poet In Residence." In 1991, she served as the Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. She then moved to Bennington, Vermont, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington until 2001. Oliver's partner, Molly Malone Cook, served as her literary agent until Cook's death in 2005. Oliver currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Poetic Identity
Oliver’s poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England. Influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau, she is known for her keen observances of the natural world. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon and humpback whales. Maxine Kumin calls Oliver "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms" and "an indefatigable guide to the natural world." Oliver has also been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shares an affinity for solitude and interior monologues. Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release. Although she has been criticized for writing poetry that assumes a dangerously close relationship of women with nature, she finds only the self is only strengthened through an immersion with nature. As her creativity is stirred by nature, Oliver is an avid walker, pursuing inspiration on foot. For Oliver, walking is part of the poetic process. Oliver is also known for her unadorned language and accessible themes.
Career
The author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, Oliver’s first collection of poems, Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963. She has since published numerous books, including Thirst (Beacon Press, 2006); Why I Wake Early (2004); Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays (2003); Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999); West Wind (1997); White Pine (1994). In 1992, her volume, New and ___Select___ed Poems (1992), won the National Book award. She won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for her piece House of Light (1990). Her volume American Primitive (1983) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. The first and second parts of her The Leaf and the Cloud were ___select___ed for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 1999 and The Best American Poetry 2000, respectively.
Awards
Honors Oliver has received include the Lannan Literary Award for poetry (1998), the National Book Award for Poetry (1992) for her collection New and ___Select___ed Poems, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1984) for her collection American Primitive, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1980), and the Shelley Memorial Award (1969/70) of the Poetry Society of America.
Critical Reviews
Poet Mary Oliver is an "indefatigable guide to the natural world," wrote Maxine Kumin in Women's Review of Books, "particularly to its lesser-known aspects."
Reviewing Dream Work for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America's finest poets, as "visionary as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson…[she is] among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey."
American Primitive, according to New York Times Book Review's Bruce Bennet, "insists on the primacy of the physical."
Holly Prado of Los Angeles Times Book Review applauded Oliver's original voice when she wrote that American Primitive "touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity."
Colin Lowndes of the Toronto Globe & Mail considered Oliver "a poet of worked-for reconciliations" whose volume deals with thresholds, or the "points at which opposing forces meet."
In her article “The Language of nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver,” Diane S. Bond said that “few feminists have wholeheartedly appreciated Oliver’s work, and though some critics have read her poems as revolutionary reconstructions of the female subject, others remain skeptical "that identification with natur4 can empower women.”
In The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Sue Russell stated that “Mary Oliver will never be a balladeer of contemporary lesbian life in the vein of Marilyn Hacker, or an important political thinker like Adrienne Rich; but the fact that she chooses not to write from a similar political or narrative stance makes her all the more valuable to our collective culture.”
Bibliography
No Voyage, and Other Poems (1963, first edition; 1965, expanded edition)
The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems (1972)
The Night Traveler (1978)
Twelve Moons (1978)
Sleeping in the Forest (1979, poetry chapbook)
American Primitive (1983)
Dream Work (1986)
Provincetown (1987, limited edition with woodcuts by Barnard Taylor)
House of Light (1990)
New and ___Select___ed Poems (1992)
A Poetry Handbook (1994)
White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems (1994)
Blue Pastures (1995)
West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems (1997)
Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998)
Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999)
The Leaf and the Cloud (2000, prose poem)
What Do We Know (2002)
Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays (2003)
Why I Wake Early: New Poems (2004)
Blue Iris: Poems and Essays (2004)
Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (2004)
New and ___Select___ed Poems, volume two (2005)
At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver (2006, audio cd)
Thirst: Poems (2006)
Our World (2007) with photographs by Molly Malone Cook
Red Bird (2008)
Biography Information about Pulitzer Prize Winning Author: Mary Oliver
The Journey
References
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 193: American Poets Since World War II, Sixth Series. Ed. Joseph Conte, State University of New York, Buffalo. The Gale Group, 1998. pp. 227-233.
Gottlieb, Mark. The Cleveland Arts Prize. 2002.
Kumin, Maxine. "Intimations of Mortality." Women's Review of Books 10:7, April 1993, p.16.
Oliver, Mary. Long Life: Essays and Other Writings. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004.