Oliver lived a profoundly simple life: she went on long walks through the woods and along the shoreline nearly every day, foraging for both greens and poetic material.
But she spent most of her life near a far rockier beach, in the town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she lived, on and off, for more than forty years, with her long-term partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005. Oliver died on Thursday, at the age of eighty-three, at her home, in Hobe Sound, Florida. And we have at least a few cups and saucers that are the ‘Wild Geese’ cups and saucers in our household.” “They would take out their new set of dishes and say, These are the ‘Silas Marner’ dishes, or the ‘Mill on the Floss’ curtains.
“George Eliot and her husband, George Lewes, used to refer to some of the material goods that they had by the names of books,” she said. In a 2001 talk to the Lannan Foundation, she introduced “Wild Geese”-which, with “The Summer Day,” is her poetic equivalent of an arena-rock ballad-with a sheepish acknowledgement of its popularity. It amused her, more than anything-that a sonneteer who wrote mostly about the natural world could have a back catalogue that the public thought about at all, let alone printed out and hung over their desks, or clamored for at readings, or quoted at length on social media. Mary Oliver was a poet who had Greatest Hits. With her sensitive, astute compositions about interior revelations, Mary Oliver made herself one of the most beloved poets of her generation.
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