Mary Oliver

Biography

Mary Oliver (1935 – 2019) was the author of more than fifteen collections of poetry, including Blue Horses (Penguin, 2014); New and Selected Poems, Volume One (Beacon, 1992), which won the National Book Award; House of Light (Beacon, 1990), which won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award; and American Primitive (Little, Brown, 1983), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Her honors include an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.



 

See Work

POETRY / Summer 1991

The Pinewoods

By Mary Oliver

This morning
   two deer
      in the pinewoods,
         in the five a.m. mist,

in a silky agitation,
   went leaping
      down into the shadows

POETRY / Winter 1982

White Night

By Mary Oliver

All night
 I float
   in the shallow ponds
    while the moon wanders

burning,
 bone white,
   among the milky stems.

POETRY / Summer 1991

When Death Comes

By Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from
    his purse