For more than forty years, Cook and Oliver made their home together, largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook’s death in 2005. It was there, in the late ’50s, that she met photographer Molly Malone Cook. Vincent Millay in upper New York state, companion to the poet’s sister Norma Millay. She lived for several years at the home of Edna St. As a young woman, Oliver studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College, but took no degree. Oliver has since published twenty books of poetry and six books of prose. The New York Times recently acknowledged Mary Oliver as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.” Born in a small town in Ohio, Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28 No Voyage and Other Poems, originally printed in the UK by Dent Press, was reissued in the United States in 1965 by Houghton Mifflin. And speak it has, for the past five decades, to countless readers. Instead, she preferred to let her work speak for itself. Walton Litz, Holmes Professor of English Literature at Princeton University, and Christopher MacGowan of the College of William and Mary) include significant textual variants as well as a wealth of previously unavailable background information on the poems.A private person by nature, Mary Oliver (1935–2019) gave very few interviews over the years. This careful attention to chronology enables the reader to chart the large contours of Williams’ early career and to appreciate the enormous advances in technique he made during his first decade as a poet. Uncollected poems of each period are inserted between individual volumes in order of first publication.

Now available as a New Directions Paperbook, this first volume of The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, covering the years 1909 through 1939, begins with the first collection of poems Williams wished to preserve, The Tempers (1913), and includes successive volumes through Adam & Eve & The City (1936) with their contents intact. Library Journal The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909-1939 PoetryĬonsidered by many to be the most characteristically American of our twentieth-century poets, William Carlos Williams “wanted to write a poem/ that you would understand./ …But you got to try hard – ' So that readers could more fully understand the extent of Williams’ radical simplicity, all of his published poetry–excluding Paterson, was reissued in two definitive volumes in 19. Here is the early work of this central figure in 20th century poetry in all its power and dazzling variety.

New and selected poems volume one