While teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, she treated students like peers. Through these narratives, details surface about Oliver. There’s a woman whose greatest regret is putting down her 80-pound pit bull after he becomes curiously aggressive, another woman who recounts the year that both of her parents were diagnosed with cancer when she was just a teenager, an actor who witnesses a whale in the wild for the first time after living decades in coastal cities, and a bestselling novelist whose father cultivated a basement full of orchids as a respite from his daily stressors as a doctor. They form a connecting thread, all of them emotionally wrought by her writing and the depths it reveals about the human condition, namely cherishing this magical, marvelous life while accepting the inevitability of death.Īnd while much of Wild and Precious dives into heavy discussions of mortality and the divine-prepare yourself for the gravity of the second, and longest, of four chapters-what emerges are relatable stories of tragedy and joy from the array of contributors. These interviewees include Oliver’s former students, religious writers, theologians, good friends and neighbors, fellow poets, and many others who were simply everyday fans. Imagine a wake, filled with mournful, thoughtful, philosophical guests telling tales of how they knew her, then spinning off into stories of their own lives and tragedies (“Tell me about despair, yours, and I’ll tell you mine,” goes the line from “Wild Geese”), followed by readings of the poems that touched them most. The recordings feature an assembly of Oliver followers, and their diverse voices offer a kind of interfaith memorial, grieving and giving thanks to this beloved American artist. If you buy this book thinking of it as a condensed college-level course, you wouldn’t be wrong. But listening to the recently released Pushkin audiobook Wild and Precious: A Celebration of Mary Oliver, a nearly five-hour reflection on her life and works, I quickly realized that her painstakingly simple, evocative lines were often metaphors for much darker themes. I wasn’t aware that so many of Mary Oliver’s poems were about death.
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