Words + Images

Mary Oliver is one of America’s most prolific and successful living poets.  In 2006 she produced a 71-page book of poetry that changed my life.  Thirst, like many of her previous works celebrates nature, but the poems also give voice to her love and loss of her partner, Mary Malone Cook.  When I first read Thirst, it did not inspire me artistically; i’m not sure that I was in a space to be inspired.   Instead, the words brought me calm during an aggressively reflective time in my life.  The poems were spare of word and rich with imagery.  They made me pause.   Even in the middle of a busy book store, reading her words felt like sitting beneath a tree watching a river flow past.  And in the quiet that was created, I began to acknowledge, for the first time perhaps, how grief need not be a burden but it does need to be acknowledged.