She settled there, writing about hermit crabs, hummingbirds, owls, dogfish, turtles, roses, trumpet vines – a wilderness of symbolic (as well as literal) flora and fauna. The two lived for many decades in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, where the beaches, ponds, fields and forests became the landscape of Oliver’s major poetry. In the late 50s, in Austerlitz, she met Molly Malone Cook, a photographer they were life partners until Cook’s death in 2005. There she spent some years helping the late poet’s sister to organise her papers. As a young woman, she was devoted to the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay and went to visit her home in Austerlitz, New York, on an impulse of affection. Oliver briefly attended Ohio State University, in Columbus, and Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, but without taking a degree. It is clear that an unhappy childhood led her into the world of words, where she was glad to remain, a reader and writer with a superb affinity for the natural world, a poet with a strong transcendentalist streak – in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Though she gave few interviews, in one of them Oliver alluded to childhood abuse, although she did not elaborate. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she was the daughter of Edward Oliver, a schoolteacher, and Helen (nee Vlasak), a secretary.
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