The popular poet who found refuge in nature

Mary Oliver was that rarest of things: a best-selling modern American poet. The author of more than 20 volumes of verse, she won a legion of loyal readers with brief, unfussy poems that explored the majesty and mystery of the natural world—and humanity’s often ugly and destructive ways. Oliver’s muses were black bears with tongues like “red fire,” flowers “soft as linen / clean as holy water,” and a rescue dog that gazed up “as though I were just as wonderful / as the perfect moon.” Many of her poems came to her during long walks through the woods and along the shoreline near her home in Provincetown, Mass. “To pay attention,” she wrote in one piece, “this is our endless and proper work.”

Born in suburban Cleveland, Oliver did not have “a happy childhood,” said NPR.org. Sexually abused by her father and neglected by her mother, Oliver said she took refuge in “the natural world and dead poets, [who] were my pals when I was a kid.” She studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College, but never graduated, and later dismissed much of her education as “a pre-established collection of certainties.”

Oliver made her literary debut in 1963 with No Voyage and Other Poems, said The Washington Post, and went on to win the Pulitzer for her 1983 collection American Primitive. Following the 2005 death of her partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, Oliver’s work took an “increasingly personal turn.” She also became more openly political and alluded to climate change and environmental destruction. Still, her poems remained infused with the sense of wonder she displayed in 1992’s “When Death Comes”: “When it’s over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement.”