Our World

Readers who savor Oliver’s exquisite gifts of attentiveness, her lean lines, her celebration of the holiness of what is, will delight in her gifts applied to the being she loved longest. And anyone who sees the best of Cook’s photographs here will celebrate a remarkable eye. —Brian Doyle, Christian Century

“Oliver interweaves entries from Cook’s journal with her own prose-and-poetry text, revealing a richly textured life, a shared world that included prominent writers and artists.” —Patricia A. Kossmann, America

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was a private person who preferred to let her work speak for itself. Her poetry resonated with countless readers for over five decades. The New York Times acknowledged her as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.”

Born in a small town in Ohio, Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28; No Voyage and Other Poems was reissued in the United States in 1965. Oliver published twenty books of poetry and six books of prose. As a young woman, Oliver studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College, but took no degree. She lived for several years at the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay in upper New York state, companion to the poet’s sister Norma Millay. There, in the late ‘50s, she met photographer Molly Malone Cook. For more than forty years, Cook and Oliver made their home together, largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook’s death in 2005.

Oliver received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for American Primitive, the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award, the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light, the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, a Lannan Foundation Literary Award, and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence.

Oliver’s essays appeared in Best American Essays 1996, 1998, 2001; the Anchor Essay Annual 1998, as well as Orion, Onearth and other periodicals. Oliver was editor of Best American Essays 2009. Oliver’s books on the craft of poetry, A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance, are used widely in writing programs. She read in practically every state as well as other countries, and led workshops at various colleges and universities, and held residencies at Case Western Reserve University, Bucknell University, University of Cincinnati, and Sweet Briar College. From 1995, for five years, she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College. She was awarded Honorary Doctorates from The Art Institute of Boston (1998), Dartmouth College (2007) and Tufts University (2008).

Molly Malone Cook (1925-2005) was born in San Francisco. One of the first photographers hired by the Village Voice, in 1960 she opened what was probably the first photography gallery on the East Coast. She also owned a bookstore, which was occasionally staffed by the filmmaker John Waters. Later, Cook became a literary agent to Oliver and other writers.

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