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Mary Oliver



Mary Oliver (1935–2019) was an American poet, teacher, speaker, editor, and prose writer who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, as well as many other honors. Her prolific work is both inspired by and deeply celebratory of nature and how it intersects with the limits of the human world.

Mary Oliver
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Felicity: Poems

"If I have any secret stash of poems, anywhere, it might be about love, not anger," Mary Oliver once said in an interview. Finally, in her stunning new collection, Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver’s love poems. Here, great happiness abounds.

book
Mary Oliver
2017
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Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

"The gift of Oliver's poetry is that she communicates the beauty she finds in the world and makes it unforgettable" ( Miami Herald ). This has never been truer than in Long Life , a luminous collection of seventeen essays and ten poems.

book
Mary Oliver
2005
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Mary Oliver Did Something Rare: She Made Poetry Accessible

Mary Oliver, arguably America's most beloved best-selling poet, had died earlier in the day, at the age of 83.

article
Maggie Smith
2019
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Episode 5: Remembering Mary Oliver

In this episode, on the occasion of Mary Oliver’s passing, I took time to read my favorite passages and poems. Her work has informed mine since 1998, and reading her words brings me back to the earliest days in my teaching and learning to lead.

podcast
Practice You
2019
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Mindful

We can become one with the world by keeping our senses open to the extraordinary all around us.

In respect of copyright, we cannot display the poem here. Click the link to read it.

poem
Mary Oliver
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A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry

With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built—meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. She talks of iambs and trochees, couplets and sonnets, and how and why this should matter to anyone writing or reading poetry.

book
Mary Oliver
1994
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Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate

"Mary Oliver is one of our era’s most beloved and prolific poets—a sage of wisdom on the craft of poetry and a master of its magic; a woman as unafraid to be witty as she is to be wise."

article
Maria Popova
2015
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Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance," wrote Alexander Pope.

book
Mary Oliver
1998
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Mary Oliver, a Poet Whose Simple Turns of Phrase Held Mass Appeal, Dies at 83

Mary Oliver’s instructions for living were simple: “Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.”

article
Meilan Solly
2019
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Mary Oliver’s Poetry Found a Second Life as a Meme

"You do not have to be good” is a stunner of a first line, an all-time great, an opening sentence for the ages, the kind of opening sentence that demands, and gets, its reader’s absolute surrender."

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Helena Fitzgerald
2019
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