The Pulitzer Prize-winning Mary Oliver is worth knowing about and worth selecting for your school to study, especially for those that value the gift of poetry appreciation, perhaps particularly for schools that enjoyed studying Charmaine Papertalk Greene, Gwen Harwood or Judith Wright in the past. Influenced by Wordsworth, Yeats and Dickinson in her content and style, this low-key lesbian, American, post-supernaturalistic poet retains a pantheistic reverence for the landscape and its inhabitants.
Noted for her use of enthymemes, Oliver has the ability to keep our students thinking long after their eyes have left the page; each poem ends with an epiphany. The themes derived from her eco-narratives include the interconnectedness of the planet’s entities, the instructive role of nature, the inevitability of death, and the equalising of humanity which, consequentially, involves the empowerment of women. Yeats-like, Oliver's is a transcendent art that celebrates a liberated creativity; she leads readers on a transformative journey from direct observation towards a recontextualised revelatory understanding.
Seven of the poems found in the prescribed Oliver text can be accessed for free at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-oliver#tab-poems so you could have a quick look to help you make a decision about whether to take the Oliver plunge. These poems are: