At the time of her death in 2019, the late Mary Oliver was one of the most successful American poets to ever publish. She wrote dozens of collections, and several highly quotable bangers that a reader would be as likely to encounter on the family bookshelf as the SAT.
With champions like Oprah and Maria Shriver, Oliver bypassed the cultural barrier that’s often left poetry siloed from the other letters, tethered to the academy.
Her greatest hits—”Don’t Hesitate,” “Wild Geese“—were that rare thing: recognizable, which helped her curry a reputation as a people’s poet. Beloved for writing accessible, romantic odes to the natural world.
A new documentary from Sasha Waters, the filmmaker behind Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, aims to stir up that genteel impression, and complicate an artist who’s sometimes been dismissed as a “nature poet.”
Waters, a filmmaker with avant-garde origins, discovered Oliver’s work more than 30 years ago care of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. She was drawn to film Oliver’s life story care of a lifelong fascination with images. “There’s a relationship between representational photography and poetry,” she told me in a recent phone interview.
