Her poetry also contains direct life advice (“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Through poetry, Oliver shared her sense of wonder (“When it’s over, I want to say /all my life I was a bride married to amazement”) often with a first person perspective and lean prose. And yet, her poems speak to something fundamental about the way we all want to live. At first glance, her quiet, woodsy life and reflective poetry has little in common with the screen-filled, dawn to dusk hustle that makes up the modern condition for most of us. In the backwoods of Provincetown, she wrote most of her poetry and essay collections, writing as she walked, including the Pultizer Prize-winning American Primitive (1984) and New and Selected Poems(1992), which won the National Book Award. And, according to Oliver, that is how she spent most of her time during the 40 plus years she spent on the coast of Massachusetts in a house she shared with her partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook. Picturing her from her poems, I think of a white haired woman rambling through the woods, careful not to disturb the wildlife as she scribbles down her next verse. In some ways, Oliver is an unlikely pop culture phenomenon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |