Mary Oliver Revisted
“I wonder a lot about whether or not you can separate an artist from their art. On the one hand it seems obvious that you can – we often fall in love with music or poems or paintings without knowing a thing about their creator. On the other hand, all art is shaped by the artist’s experience and I usually find that knowing about their life completely changes the way I understand their work (not always for the best).
Mary Oliver is a perfect example. Her writing speaks for itself and her poems are beautiful and meaningful, completely independent of the writer. I felt an intuitive connection to her words long before my fascination with her began. But learning about her life has allowed me to read her poetry with a deepened sense of empathy and comfort.
You can intuit certain core things about her by the themes of her writing – that she had been intensely in love, that she spent a lot of time in nature, that she had some darkness in her life. She was a very private person — never much one for interviews – but from the rare few that she granted during her life, she spoke openly, and it’s from one of them that I learned, for example, about how the abuse that she suffered as a child drove her to naturally form a deep relationship with the non-human world.
But the most moving insight into her life comes from Our World, Oliver’s tribute to her love and partner of over 40 years, photographer Molly Malone Cook. The book is both Oliver’s eulogy to her departed companion and a memoir of celebration and gratitude for their life together. It’s a collection of Cook’s photos and journal entries, woven together by Oliver’s prose and a handful of poems. The result is a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the life shared by these two extraordinary women – the intimate world of love and profound aliveness that they created for themselves.
Oliver writes about Cook, to whom she refers simply as M., with her signature elegant wit: “She was style, she was an old loneliness that nothing could quite wipe away; she was vastly knowledgeable about people, about books, about the mind’s emotions and the heart’s. She lived sometimes in a black box of memories and unanswerable questions, and then would come out and frolic – be feisty, and bold.” -Tamid Ahmed
Your friend,
Robert
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/
The book My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny is available to order via this link:
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/
And you can order the French version here below: 