Mary Oliver

American poet of attention. She grew up in a difficult Ohio household — she would later say, briefly and without dramatizing, that the woods saved her life. As a teenager she walked out one day to the home of the late poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and ended up living there for years, helping the sister organize Millay's papers. She moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts in the 1960s with the photographer Molly Malone Cook, her partner of more than forty years, and walked the dunes every morning before writing. Her poems are short, plain, devoted. She does not look away from suffering and she does not stop noticing the heron, the grasshopper, the black oak. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for *American Primitive* and the National Book Award in 1992 for *New and Selected Poems*. After Molly died in 2005 she wrote *Thirst* and *A Thousand Mornings* — grief held inside praise. Core teaching: attention is the beginning of devotion. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. Key works: *American Primitive*, *Dream Work*, *House of Light*, *New and Selected Poems*, *Why I Wake Early*, *Thirst*, *A Thousand Mornings*, *Devotions* (collected).