Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was an American poet, born on 10 September 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio, and known for short, plain-spoken lyric poems about the natural world. She died at Hobe Sound, Florida, on 17 January 2019.

She studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s without taking a degree. Her first collection, No Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in London by J. M. Dent in 1963; Houghton Mifflin of Boston issued an expanded American edition in 1965. American Primitive (Little, Brown, 1983) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1992) won the National Book Award. Other collections include Twelve Moons (1979), Dream Work (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), House of Light (1990), White Pine (1994), Why I Wake Early (2004), Red Bird (2008), A Thousand Mornings (2012), Blue Horses (2014), Felicity (2015) and Devotions (2017), a selected poems. She also wrote prose, including A Poetry Handbook (1994) and Winter Hours (1999). For more than forty years she lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with the photographer Molly Malone Cook, and she taught at Bennington College until 2001.

For collectors

Her debut is the key book: Open Library records the J. M. Dent edition of No Voyage (London, 1963) two years before the Houghton Mifflin edition, so the London printing is the first edition. The prize-winning books are the other obvious targets: the 1983 Little, Brown first of American Primitive and the 1992 Beacon Press first of New and Selected Poems. Dream Work was first issued by Atlantic Monthly Press in Boston in 1986.