Mary Oliver: Poet of the Natural World: A Library of Congress Exhibit Celebrates Pulitzer-Prize Winning Poet Mary Oliver

This is a guest post by Manuscript Division historian Barbara Bair.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) remains one of the nation’s most popular and widely read poets. She is best known for her poetry about the healing, revelatory, and transformative benefits of observing and immersing oneself in nature, and for her prose about natural history, literature, and life.

A Library of Congress National Poetry Month exhibit, Mary Oliver: Poet of the Natural World, will be on display on the second-floor mezzanine of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building through May 31, 2025.

All the items on display come from the Mary Oliver Papers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. The exhibit chronicles how Oliver’s deep interest in the natural world—in woods and meadows, streams, ponds, and marshes; birds, animals, and plants—stemmed from her childhood in Ohio, extended throughout her career as a writer, and framed her adult life in the seaside community of Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The exhibit features objects representative of the collection, including photographs of Oliver, a diary and journal, a bird-watching list, personal correspondence, draft poems, and the cover design for one of her books. Also on display is evidence of sources of inspiration for Oliver, including beach-findings and feathers she collected on her walks, two books she kept on her writing desk, and her relationships with friends and her longtime partner, photographer and bookstore owner Molly Malone Cook (1925-2005).

Oliver was a birdwatcher and animal lover from her youth. Her outdoor forays in Ohio brought her to favorite trees and the banks of a flowing stream. The first part of the exhibit includes photographs of Oliver as a child, teenager, and mature writer; a snapshot she kept of a swimming swan; some of her lists recording bird sightings; a diary description of springtime; and the mockup for the cover design of Owls and Other Fantasies (2003), one of the collections of writings she named for birds, like Red Bird (2008) and Swan (2010).

In Owls and Other Fantasies, Oliver made many species of birds and their habitats her subject matter. In the book’s poems and essays, she paid tribute to a swan, a loon, a hawk, a kingfisher, a meadowlark, a catbird, a crow, owls, herons, hummingbirds, kookaburras, wrens, and starlings. She opened the book with one of her most famous poems, “Wild Geese.” The part of the exhibit devoted to Oliver’s love of birds includes a set of feathers that inspired the graphic illustrations that appear in the pages of Owls and Other Fantasies.

The next section of the display, on her contemplative life in Provincetown, features seashells and a broken ceramic bird she gathered while beachcombing near the shoreline. Oliver’s life in the environs of Provincetown was shared with Cook and a circle of friends that included filmmaker and artist John Waters. Oliver first met Cook at Steepletop, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s historic home and farm in the Hudson River Valley. The two began living in Provincetown full time after Oliver retired from teaching in 2001.

The Provincetown portion of the exhibit shows Oliver enjoying boating and time with Cook, and walking in the woods with her friend, the dancer, potter, and ecologist Paulus Berensohn (1933-2017). In a joyful 2001 note to Berensohn signed by both Mary and Molly, Oliver described the transition to year-round life in Provincetown as a return to “the ocean’s edge, to the woods, to sunrises . . . oak leaves, grass, and grasshoppers.” Other letters in the Mary Oliver Papers reveal that Berensohn, who shared Oliver’s close affinity with nature, served as a confidante for Oliver during Cook’s struggle with and eventual death from cancer, and the grief that Oliver experienced after her partner’s passing.

In the aftermath of Cook’s death, Oliver found personal comfort and spiritual uplift in poetry, in encouraging environmental awareness, and in the rituals of the Episcopal Church. She kept a copy of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer close at hand on her desk and taped a schedule for prayer times, along with the word COURAGE to her typewriter.  She also cherished a day-by-day collection of work by the Persian poet Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings (2006), edited by her friend, the translator and fellow naturalist poet Coleman Barks. In her copy, retained in her papers, Oliver marked the Rumi poem “Love Moves Away” with a plain slip of paper. The poem is testament to the difficulty of finding equanimity after loss. Taking walks to the seashore and nearby Blackwater Pond also continued to soothe and provide a meditative state of grace for Oliver and to inspire new poetry.

Visitors to the exhibit can read the Rumi poem, as well as typed drafts of two of Oliver’s own poetic works, “At Great Pond” (which figures the sun rising like a bird in flight) and “Morning at Blackwater” (which describes the “half-miracles” of birds and insects that begin to sing at dawn and the scent of blossoming honeysuckle, like a “sweet odor of prayer.”)

For more information on visiting the Library of Congress and to obtain free timed-entry tickets, see https://www.loc.gov/visit/.

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“Manuscript Division . . .” See also Barbara Bair, “Poet of the Natural World: Mary Oliver Papers Newly Available in the Manuscript Division,” Unfolding History blog post, June 20, 2024.

“Hudson River Valley . . .” In addition to the Mary Oliver Papers, the Manuscript Division’s Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers hold Mary Oliver materials stemming from Oliver’s friendship with Millay’s sister and literary executor Norma Millay, and Oliver’s residence for a time at the historic property. Molly Malone Cook served as Oliver’s literary manager during their years in Provincetown.

“grasshoppers . . .” Mary Oliver and Molly Malone Cook to Paulus Berensohn, September 7, 2001, box 9, Mary Oliver Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.