At the time of her death in 2019, the late Mary Oliver was one of the most successful American poets to ever publish. She wrote dozens of collections, and several highly quotable bangers that a reader would be as likely to encounter on the family bookshelf as the SAT.
With champions like Oprah and Maria Shriver, Oliver bypassed the cultural barrier that’s often left poetry siloed from the other letters, tethered to the academy.
Her greatest hits—”Don’t Hesitate,” “Wild Geese“—were that rare thing: recognizable, which helped her curry a reputation as a people’s poet. Beloved for writing accessible, romantic odes to the natural world.
A new documentary from Sasha Waters, the filmmaker behind Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, aims to stir up that genteel impression, and complicate an artist who’s sometimes been dismissed as a “nature poet.”
Waters, a filmmaker with avant-garde origins, discovered Oliver’s work more than 30 years ago care of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. She was drawn to film Oliver’s life story care of a lifelong fascination with images. “There’s a relationship between representational photography and poetry,” she told me in a recent phone interview.
“In the best case scenario they both draw from the actual world—the visual world, the social world—and then transform their materials through metaphor.”
Oliver in her adopted Provincetown.
Produced by Kino Lorber, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World uses Mary’s “materials” to show the poet’s unruly side. This was no easy task, for Oliver was notoriously fierce about guarding her private life. And very little filmed footage of the artist exits.
That plus a predilection for writing about untrendy animals combined to give the impression that Oliver was—as Waters told me—”a sweet little old lady,” more accessible than sophisticated. But in Saved by the Beauty of the World, a more dynamic picture emerges.
Composed of interviews with Oliver’s close friends (John Waters, David Keplinger) and admiring peers (Major Jackson, Ariana Reines), and interspersed with recitations from celebrity fans (Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus), there’s an ekphrastic quality to the film. We drift between homage and analysis.
In early scenes, weight is given to Oliver’s eccentricity and ambition, two under-sung traits. Casual fans may be surprised by the film’s categorization of the poet: this Mary is bohemian, dogged, and desirous.
A young Mary Oliver, surrounded by books.
This reader did not know, for instance, that Mary Oliver was a teenage runaway—though she forsook the charms of a major city for the wild. (“Some people go into the library,” Mary narrates at one point. “I went into the woods.”) I also did not know that she left home again at 17 to talk her way into an internship at Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
I did not know that Oliver had a bohemian era in Greenwich Village, or that she was a lifelong smoker. Or that for most of her life, she lived at the poverty line so her devotional practice could be structured around daily walks in the woods surrounding her home in Provincetown.
Mary and her partner of decades, Molly Malone Cook. In the film, Oliver refers to their incredible bond. “We were talkers. It was a 40 year conversation.”
I also did not know that Oliver was a lesbian poet, partner to the gallerist and photographer Molly Malone Cook for thirty years. In the film, John Waters (no relation to the filmmaker), offers an especially fond reflection on their love story, which shaped Oliver’s early work and facilitated her career.
And though Oliver never wrote about bodily lust the way certain peers did, Saved by the Beauty of the World insists over and over that love was the writer’s guiding star.
More than nature, her true subject—both Waters’s suggest—was awe. Oliver trafficked in deep feeling, and insisted on honoring life in every gesture. She measured a poem’s success by a three question metric: if a work served a spiritual purpose, had a sincere energy, and a genuine body, she felt she could stand behind it.
Mary Oliver with her two dogs.
The documentary functions well as a thorough homage punctuated by flashes of lyricism (notably in the celebrity readings). Yet Saved by the Beauty of the World stops short of presenting a flawless idol; that restraint is its strength. There are quirky, endearing passages—like John Waters recounting the moment Oliver was bitten by a badger on a woodland walk.
Then there are enigmas that endure.
Crucially, the film grants space to Oliver’s critics, who argued she should have weighed in on the AIDS crisis as a queer writer during its peak. It also covers a late-life relationship Oliver formed after Cook’s passing, inviting questions about compatibility and a later move to Florida.
In another delicate turn, the poet Nick Flynn offers a concise appraisal of the guardedness associated with Oliver on the page. “She always presented herself in the light,” he observes, suggesting there was no wrestling with her own shadow. This reading feels fair when weighed against the highlights of her body of work.
Oliver at her typewriter.
Yet in the film’s closing chapter, as Oliver gathers honors and the wide public esteem she would live with, she finally speaks openly about childhood sexual abuse she endured. This frank moment is framed as an artistic victory—though the poems chosen to frame this revelation aren’t necessarily late-era writings.
Overall, the work unfolds as a thematic through-line, a non-chronological companion to Oliver’s life rather than a strict biography. And regarding the darker strands, Waters (Sasha) explains that every unflinching moment in the film is deliberate, a testament to Oliver’s most sacred vow: paying attention is a form of love.
“I think she genuinely was indifferent to the trends of the literary establishment,” said Waters. “She was playing the long game. She wrote for an audience she always believed was out there, and also for the future…in her lifetime and beyond.”
As a viewer who entered Saved by the Beauty of the World as a general admirer of Oliver, perhaps not entranced from the start, I left moved and tender, with lines of poetry lingering on my tongue. I felt urged to yell into a canyon or wander the woods, and those impulses struck me as less quaint than deeply felt and meaningful.
I hope you manage to catch Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World in a limited release near you.
Images via Kina Lorber
