Mary Oliver has been played on NTS in shows including Sanam, featured first on 1 September 2022. Songs played include The Lily and Wild Geese.

There are two artists who share this name:

1) Mary Oliver (born in La Jolla, California) is a player of viola, violin, and Hardanger fiddle. She received her Master of Fine Arts from San Francisco State University before going on to get her doctorate in Theory and Practice of Improvisation from the University of California, San Diego.

2) Mary Oliver (born September 10, 1935) is an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times described her as "far and away, this country's [the US's] best-selling poet".

Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. V. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland. Her father was a social studies teacher and an athletics coach in the Cleveland public schools. She began writing poetry at the age of 14, and at 17 visited the home of the late Pulitzer Prize winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Austerlitz, upper New York state. She and Norma, the poet’s sister, became friends and Oliver “more or less lived there for the next six or seven years, running around the 800 acres like a child, helping Norma, or at least being company to her” and assisting with organising the late poet's papers. On a return visit, in the late '50s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty years. In Our world she says “I took one look and fell, hook and tumble." Oliver and Cook, her partner of forty years and literary agent, made their home together, largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook's death in 2005, and where Oliver still lives. Greatly valuing her personal privacy, Oliver has given very few interviews, saying she prefers for her writing to speak for itself. She recalls "I too fell in love with the town, that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers.[…] M. and I decided to stay.” Oliver briefly attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s, but did not receive a degree at either college.

Oliver’s first collection of poems, Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963, when she was 28. During the early 1980s, Oliver taught at Case Western Reserve University. Her fifth collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She was Poet In Residence at Bucknell University (1986) and Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College (1991), then moving to Bennington, Vermont, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching until 2001. She won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for her piece House of Light (1990) and New and Selected Poems (1992), won the National Book Award. [3]Oliver's work turns towards nature for its inspiration and describes the sense of wonder it instills in her. “When it’s over", she says, "I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” (“When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems (1992). Her collections Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), and New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004) build the themes. The first and second parts of Leaf and the Cloud are featured in The Best American Poetry 1999 and 2000, respectively [5] and her essays appear in Best American Essays 1996, 1998 and 2001. Oliver and Molly Malone Cook, her partner of forty years and literary agent, made their home together, largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook's death in 2005, and where Oliver still lives. Greatly valuing her personal privacy, Oliver has given very few interviews, saying she prefers for her writing to speak for itself.