+by+Molly+Malone+Cook.jpg)
— photo by Molly Malone Cook
even in winter, we meet
somewhere between these sylvan pages,
promises made,
kept in quiet corners
shadowed with memories
we rarely spoke of infinity;
it sculpted every breath
with silence
***
Author notes:
Photograph of bookshelf at Steepletop (Austerlitz, NY) by Molly Malone Cook
September 10th is the birthday of one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver. She was born in Maple Heights, Ohio (1935). When she was a teenager, she dropped out of college and made a pilgrimage to Edna St. Vincent Millay's estate [Steepletop] in upstate New York, and although Millay had been dead for several years, her sister Norma still lived there. The two women hit it off, and Oliver ended up living on the estate for several years. It's there that she met Molly Malone Cook, who had come to pay a visit to Millay. Oliver and Cook fell in love and moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts together. Cook became Oliver's literary agent and also sometimes impersonated Oliver for phone interviews because [Mary] hated talking to the press. They were together for more than 40 years, and after Cook died in 2005, Oliver published "Thirst" (2006), a collection of poems about her grief.
— notes by Lori A. Hamilton
The Uses of Sorrow by Mary Oliver
(from "Thirst")
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Beautiful, and really interesting author info. I like M.O. but never know much about her. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteThank you for your time and kind words, Mary - I'm glad you enjoyed it. I've got over 100 various columns posted on a poetry website, many of them with an abundance of information on authors I admire - and other columns are humorous, about music, loaded with quotations, etc. - for example, I have a 5-part series on Emily Dickinson alone, as well as one on Edna St. Vincent Millay - also, columns on Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton with numerous links to YouTube recordings of them reading their own poems - very cool. Here's the link, should you wish to peruse further.
Deletehttp://allpoetry.com/columns/by/WandaLeaBrayton
Also - and most unfortunate - apparently Mary Oliver has recently cancelled numerous speaking engagements due to a serious illness - what it could be, I don't know, but she's very ill. Here's a link to the story about it on Poetry.org - she's one of those writers I was rather late in discovering, but dove deeply into her currents of language.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/search/?q=mary+oliver