Mary Oliver, who has died aged 83, was perhaps the most popular American poet of the past few decades. The winner of a Pulitzer prize in 1984, she was loved for good reasons. Her poems are simple and straightforward, crystalline, reflecting a deep love of nature, and connecting the spirit world with the physical world in subtle ways. She wrote with a natural, even naive, enthusiasm for life itself, as in her majestic When Death Comes (1991), in which she cries:
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.
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