"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Thursday, October 8, 2026

Halloween Songs & Poems for Kids


Halloween Songs for Kids





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Halloween Collection IV



Theme in Yellow
by Carl Sandburg

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.


Copyright Credit: Carl Sandburg, "Theme in Yellow"
from Chicago Poems (New York: Henry Holt
and Company, 1916). Public domain.



Some One
by Walter de la Mare

Some one came knocking
At my wee, small door;
Some one came knocking,
I’m sure—sure—sure;
I listened, I opened,
I looked to left and right,
But nought there was a-stirring
In the still dark night;
Only the busy beetle
Tap-tapping on the wall,
Only from the forest
The screech-owl’s call,
Only the cricket whistling
While the dewdrops fall,
So I know not who came knocking,

At all, at all, at all.



All Hallows

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.



Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I
[Round about the cauldron go]
by William Shakespeare

The three witches, casting a spell

Round about the cauldron go;   
In the poison’d entrails throw.   
Toad, that under cold stone    
Days and nights hast thirty one   
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,   
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.   

     Double, double toil and trouble; 
     Fire burn and cauldron bubble.   

Fillet of a fenny snake,   
In the cauldron boil and bake;   
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,   
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,   
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,   
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,   
For a charm of powerful trouble, 
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.   

     Double, double toil and trouble;   
     Fire burn and cauldron bubble.  

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,      
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf     
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,     
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,     
Liver of blaspheming Jew,      
Gall of goat, and slips of yew     
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,     
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,     
Finger of birth-strangled babe      
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,     
Make the gruel thick and slab:     
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,     
For the ingredients of our cauldron.

     Double, double toil and trouble;   
     Fire burn and cauldron bubble.



Mr. Macklin’s Jack O’Lantern
by David McCord

Mr. Macklin takes his knife 
And carves the yellow pumpkin face: 
Three holes bring eyes and nose to life, 
The mouth has thirteen teeth in place. 
Then Mr. Macklin just for fun 
Transfers the corn-cob pipe from his 
Wry mouth to Jack’s, and everyone 
Dies laughing! O what fun it is 
Till Mr. Macklin draws the shade 
And lights the candle in Jack’s skull.
Then all the inside dark is made 
As spooky and as horrorful 
As Halloween, and creepy crawl 
The shadows on the tool-house floor, 
With Jack’s face dancing on the wall. 
O Mr. Macklin! where's the door?


Dusk in Autumn
by Sara Teasdale

The moon is like a scimitar,
A little silver scimitar,
A-drifting down the sky.
And near beside it is a star,
A timid twinkling golden star,
That watches like an eye.
 
And thro’ the nursery window-pane
The witches have a fire again,
Just like the ones we make,—
And now I know they’re having tea,
I wish they’d give a cup to me,
With witches’ currant cake.



The Haunted House
by Felicia Dorothea Hemans

I seem like one
Who treads alone
   Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
   And all but me departed.
           —Thomas Moore, “Oft in the Stilly Night (Scotch Air)”

See’st thou yon gray gleaming hall,
Where the deep elm-shadows fall?
Voices that have left the earth
     Long ago,
Still are murmuring round its hearth,
     Soft and low:
Ever there;—yet one alone
Hath the gift to hear their tone.
Guests come thither, and depart,
Free of step, and light of heart;
Children, with sweet visions blessed,
In the haunted chambers rest;
One alone unslumbering lies
When the night hath sealed all eyes,
One quick heart and watchful ear,
Listening for those whispers clear.
 
See’st thou where the woodbine-flowers
O’er yon low porch hang in showers?
Startling faces of the dead,
     Pale, yet sweet,
One lone woman’s entering tread
     There still meet!
Some with young, smooth foreheads fair,
Faintly shining through bright hair;
Some with reverend locks of snow—
All, all buried long ago!
All, from under deep sea-waves,
Or the flowers of foreign graves,
Or the old and bannered aisle,
Where their high tombs gleam the while;
Rising, wandering, floating by,
Suddenly and silently,
Through their earthly home and place,
But amidst another race.
 
Wherefore, unto one alone,
Are those sounds and visions known?
Wherefore hath that spell of power
     Dark and dread,
On her soul, a baleful dower,
     Thus been shed?
Oh! in those deep-seeing eyes,
No strange gift of mystery lies!
She is lone where once she moved,
Fair, and happy, and beloved!
Sunny smiles were glancing round her,
Tendrils of kind hearts had bound her;
Now those silver chords are broken,
Those bright looks have left no token;
Not one trace on all the earth,
Save her memory of their mirth.
She is lone and lingering now,
Dreams have gathered o’er her brow,
Midst gay songs and children’s play,
She is dwelling far away;
Seeing what none else may see—
Haunted still her place must be!


Copyright Credit: Felicia Dorothea Hemans, “The Haunted House”
from National lyrics, and songs for music.  Dublin: William Curry Jr.
and Company; London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1834. Public domain.



All Hallows’ Eve

Be perfect, make it otherwise.
Yesterday is torn in shreds.
Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes
Rip apart the breathing beds.
Hear bones crack and pulverize.
Doom creeps in on rubber treads.
Countless overwrought housewives,
Minds unraveling like threads,
Try lipstick shades to tranquilize
Fears of age and general dreads.
Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,
Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.
Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise
You and the werewolf: newlyweds.


Copyright Credit: Dorothea Tanning, “All Hallows’ Eve”
from Coming to That. Copyright © 2011 by Dorothea Tanning.
Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.



Ghost Music
by Robert Graves

Gloomy and bare the organ-loft,
Bent-backed and blind the organist.
From rafters looming shadowy,
From the pipes’ tuneful company,
Drifted together drowsily,
Innumerable, formless, dim,
The ghosts of long-dead melodies,
Of anthems, stately, thunderous,
Of Kyries shrill and tremulous:
In melancholy drowsy-sweet
They huddled there in harmony.
Like bats at noontide rafter-hung.


Copyright © 2016 by Wayne Miller.
Originally published in Poem-a-Day
on October 15, 2016,
by the Academy of American Poets.



All Souls’ Night

Epilogue to "A Vision"

Midnight has come and the great Christ Church bell
And many a lesser bell sound through the room;
And it is All Souls’ Night.
And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel
Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;
For it is a ghost’s right,
His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, can stay
Wound in mind’s pondering,
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;
Because I have a marvellous thing to say,
A certain marvellous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

Horton’s the first I call. He loved strange thought
And knew that sweet extremity of pride
That’s called platonic love,
And that to such a pitch of passion wrought
Nothing could bring him, when his lady died,
Anodyne for his love.
Words were but wasted breath;
One dear hope had he:
The inclemency
Of that or the next winter would be death.

Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tell
Whether of her or God he thought the most,
But think that his mind’s eye,
When upward turned, on one sole image fell;
And that a slight companionable ghost,
Wild with divinity,
Had so lit up the whole
Immense miraculous house
The Bible promised us,
It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.

On Florence Emery I call the next,
Who finding the first wrinkles on a face
Admired and beautiful,
And by foreknowledge of the future vexed;
Diminished beauty, multiplied commonplace;
Preferred to teach a school
Away from neighbour or friend,
Among dark skins, and there
Permit foul years to wear
Hidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.

Before that end much had she ravelled out
From a discourse in figurative speech
By some learned Indian
On the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about
Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,
Until it plunge into the sun;
And there, free and yet fast,
Being both Chance and Choice,
Forget its broken toys
And sink into its own delight at last.

I call MacGregor Mathers from his grave,
For in my first hard spring-time we were friends,
Although of late estranged.
I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,
And told him so, but friendship never ends;
And what if mind seem changed,
And it seem changed with the mind,
When thoughts rise up unbid
On generous things that he did
And I grow half contented to be blind!

He had much industry at setting out,
Much boisterous courage, before loneliness
Had driven him crazed;
For meditations upon unknown thought
Make human intercourse grow less and less;
They are neither paid nor praised.
But he’d object to the host,
The glass because my glass;
A ghost-lover he was
And may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.

But names are nothing. What matter who it be,
So that his elements have grown so fine
The fume of muscatel
Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy
No living man can drink from the whole wine.
I have mummy truths to tell
Whereat the living mock,
Though not for sober ear,
For maybe all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

Such thought—such thought have I that hold it tight
Till meditation master all its parts,
Nothing can stay my glance
Until that glance run in the world’s despite
To where the damned have howled away their hearts,
And where the blessed dance;
Such thought, that in it bound
I need no other thing,
Wound in mind’s wandering
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.


Copyright Credit: William Butler Yeats, “All Souls’ Night”
from Seven Poems and a Fragment.
Dundrum: The Cuala Press, 1922. Public domain.



"Top 25 Scary Poems of All Time"
Gathered by Michael R. Burch

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
Tom O'Bedlam's Song by Anonymous
A Lyke-Wake Dirge by Anonymous
The Raven, Ulalume, Alone and Lenore by Edgar Allan Poe
Ophélie (“Ophelia”) and Antico (“Ancient”) by Arthur Rimbaud
"Song of the Witches" from Macbeth by William Shakespeare
The Bustle in a House and Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats
The Broken Tower by Hart Crane
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Allayne by Kevin N. Roberts
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
A Last Word by Ernest Dowson
La Belle Dame sans Merci
by John Keats
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Listeners by Walter de la Mare
Luke Havergal and The Mill by Edward Arlington Robinson
The Unreturning by Wilfred Owen
Her Kind by Anne Sexton and Daddy by Sylvia Plath (a tie between friends)
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
The Vampire by Conrad Aiken
The Fisher by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Du by Janet Kenny
Part 6 from The Dark Side of the Deity: Interlude by Joe M. Ruggier
Haunted Houses by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Poems by Anne Carson


Poet Anne Carson

Father's Old Blue Cardigan
by Anne Carson

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face --
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

Copyright © 2000 by Anne Carson


O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love
by Anne Carson

I like being with you all night with closed eyes.
What luck—here you are
coming
along the stars!
I did a road trip
all over my mind and heart
and
there you were
kneeling by the roadside
with your little toolkit
fixing something.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

Copyright © 2020 by Anne Carson.
Originally published in Poem-a-Day
on December 10, 2020,
by the Academy of American Poets


Apostle Town
by Anne Carson

After your death.
It was windy every day.
Every day.
Opposed us like a wall.
We went.
Shouting sideways at one another.
Along the road.
It was useless.
The spaces between us.
Got hard.
They are empty spaces.
And yet they are solid.
And black and grievous.
As gaps between the teeth.
Of an old woman.
You knew years ago.
When she was.
Beautiful the nerves pouring around in her like palace fire.

Anne Carson Saturday
October 15, 2016


Anne Carson Bio

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq4g1j54nepyo

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-carson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Carson


Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, and classicist known for blending ancient mythology with modern forms. Her most popular poems, verse novels, and lyric collections include:

Major Verse Novels and Long Poems


Autobiography of Red (1998): A celebrated novel in verse that retells the fragmentary myth of Geryon and Heracles by Stesichorus, reimagining the winged monster as a modern gay teenager.


The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001): A narrative poem in 29 sections exploring the anatomy of a failed marriage, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. 

The Glass Essay (1995): A long, semi-autobiographical lyric poem from Plainwater that confronts grief, a broken relationship, and the haunting presence of Emily Brontë on a northern moor.


Standout Short Poems and Lyrical Works

"Father's Old Blue Cardigan": A poignant, sharply observed reflection on her father's memory and mental decline.

"O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love": A compact, striking lyric on the fragile and disorienting nature of falling in love.

"Apostle Town": Opening with the famous lines, "After your death. It was windy every day. Every day. Opposed us like a wall".


Glass, Irony, and God (1992): A collection containing seminal short talks and verse pieces that established her distinct voice.

Other poems. Listed on PoemHunter.com

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

R.E. Slater - An Autumn Day



An Autumn Day
by R.E. Slater

Beneath a bright blue sky and warming sun
greets happy breezes hurrying and scurrying
across leafy realms in lively crackle and flutter.
Fat ground squirrels are restlessly heard
scampering about with nut and acorn
digging in their wares within an endless
cacophony of buzzing insects beating
time to the pulse of the earth enlarged
its tapestry of sound in measured hum.

O'erhead leafy bowers rustle and turn
spreading their golden hues and glows
in painted ambers, russets, and golds.
The autumn airs fill the churning woods
in dancing drops of burnished fire
fluttering down to become instant
homes for fuzzy woolly bears
seeking winter warmth and shelter.

And I, resting from day's labor,
nestle within my spinning expanse,
hearing the ancient songs of youth.
Embraced within enchanting spells
brimming a Northland's ancient climes
and waking dream unwilling slumber
content upon a day's gracious warrant
to be renewed and enlivened before
the coming winter snows drawing near.


R.E. Slater
October 7, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved



Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.



Fall, Leaves, Fall
by Emily Brontë

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night's decay
Ushers in a drearier day.



Autumn
T. E. Hulme

A touch of cold in the Autumn night -
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.



October
by Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.



Three Autumn Haiku

Matsuo Bashō

Autumn moonlight -
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut.

Yosa Buson

Light of the moon
moves westward, shadows of flowers
creep eastward.

Kobayashi Issa

Yellow autumn leaves
tumbling down...
a deer calls its mate.



A Note for an Autumn Day
Perhaps that is what autumn gives us each year: not merely color, but a reminder. The leaves become most brilliant just before they fall. The days grow precious because they shorten. What was green becomes gold, what was gold returns to earth, and what appears to be an ending quietly prepares the way for another beginning. For a little while, then, we walk beneath the trees. And pay attention.

R.E. Slater
October 7, 2026


Sunday, July 19, 2026

The Odyssey



LINK -

THE WORLD BEHIND HOMER


~~  I created this post several months ahead of the film debut to
help guide those unfamiliar with the Iliad and Odyssey  ~~

Below the first several poems can be found the history
and background of Greece's ancient legends.

R.E. Slater




Tuesday, July 7, 2026

Mary Oliver - Fall Poems

 


Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries – roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.



Fall

the black oaks
fling their bronze fruit
into all the pockets of the earth
pock pock

they knock against the thresholds
the roof the sidewalk
fill the eaves
the bottom line

of the old gold song
of the almost finished year
what is spring all that tender
green stuff

compared to this 
falling of tiny oak trees
out of the oak trees
then the clouds

gathering thick along the west
then advancing
then closing over
breaking open

the silence
then the rain
dashing its silver seeds
against the house

* * * * * * *


* * * * * * *


* * * * * * *

Poet Mary Oliver
Biography of Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver was an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books, “particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” Oliver’s poetry focused on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, “lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.” Kumin also noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.” Oliver’s poetry won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement. Reviewing Dream Work (1986) for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America’s finest poets, as “visionary as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson.”

Mary Oliver was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She would retreat from a difficult home to the nearby woods, where she would build huts of sticks and grass and write poems. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either institution. As a young poet, Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers. Oliver is notoriously reticent about her private life, but it was during this period that she met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work. Known for its clear and poignant observations and evocative use of the natural world, Oliver’s poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition. Her work received early critical attention; American Primitive (1983), her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. According to Bruce Bennetin the New York Times Book Review, American Primitive, “insists on the primacy of the physical.” Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works.” Holly Prado of the Los Angeles Times Book Review also applauded Oliver’s original voice, writing that American Primitive “touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.”

Dream Work (1986) continues Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature” according to Prado in a later review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Ostriker considered Oliver “among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey.” For Ostriker, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’ ... into the world of historical and personal suffering. ... She confronts as well, steadily,” Ostriker continued, “what she cannot change.”

The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms was also evident in New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award. The volume contains poems from eight of Oliver’s previous volumes as well as previously unpublished, newer work. Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, noticed that Oliver’s earliest poems were almost always oriented toward nature, but they seldom examined the self and were almost never personal. In contrast, Oliver appeared constantly in her later works. But as Reynolds noted “this self-consciousness is a rich and graceful addition.” Just as the contributor for Publishers Weekly called particular attention to the pervasive tone of amazement with regard to things seen in Oliver’s work, Reynolds found Oliver’s writings to have a “Blake-eyed revelatory quality.” Oliver summed up her desire for amazement in her poem “When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

Oliver continued her celebration of the natural world in her next collections, including Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004), and Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (2010). Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman. “Oliver’s poetry,” wrote Poetry magazine contributor Richard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling.” 

A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, Oliver routinely published a new book every year or two. Her main themes continue to be the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the limits of human consciousness and language in articulating such a meeting. Jeanette McNew in Contemporary Literature described “Oliver’s visionary goal,” as “constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully conferred subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition. … At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal ‘a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy / like a shadow.’” Her last books included A Thousand Mornings (2012), Dog Songs (2013), Blue Horses (2014), Felicity (2015), Upstream: Selected Essays (2016), and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017).

Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. In addition to such major awards as the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Oliver  received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award.

Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Hobe Sound, Florida, until her death in early 2019. She was 83.