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Lover of the natural
world, Hermit poet,
Beatnik, Feminist,
Lesbian, Smoker,
Eccentric who talked to
the animals in the
woods, the maverick
Mary Oliver published
more than 30
collections of poetry
and essays on nature,
beauty, and love.
Sasha Waters’s meditative documentary film Mary Oliver:
Saved by the Beauty of the World opens with the renown talk
show host Stephen Colbert reciting Mary Oliver’s poem “The
Summer Day” which begins:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass …
But Colbert gets tangled in his emotions because he is reciting
this for his children, a ritual he performs at the start of every
summer. The 19-lined poem ends as follows:
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Waters brings Colbert back at the conclusion of the film to
complete the poem.
Throughout the film, she depicts that “one wild and precious
life” with a stream of wildlife clips that intimately show the
courting of geese, a fox sniffing out possible prey in snow, a
beaver building a dam, a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.
The imagery follows a stream of consciousness that is
uninhibited by explanation and psychologically bridges the
stories told by Oliver’s friends and acolytes.
Some of the poets who knew Oliver and who were
interviewed in this film include—Coleman Barks, Major
Jackson, Ada Limon, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Donika Kelly,
Mark Doty, David Keplinger. The filmmaker John Waters (no
relation to Sasha Waters) was consistently entertaining in his
comic vignettes of Oliver and his lack of appreciation for the
natural world. For example, he said she got bit by a badger
because she was helping him build his dam [sic]. “Get out of
there! Served her right,” he said.
Sasha Waters intercuts readings of Oliver’s poetry, nature
imagery, and interviews with impressive creative agility and
timing. Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Colbert, and
Eunice Shriver are treated like everyone else, such that the
filmmaker never loses sight of her subject.
Poet David Keplinger tells the story about Mary at age 17
running away from home in Ohio and spending a week in the
woods. That experience solidified her relationship with the
natural world.
As a teenager, Oliver visited Steepletop in Austerlitz, New
York, the estate Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband
Eugen Boissevain developed that included extensive gardens,
a sapping maple grove, and much more. In the mid 1950s,
Olver spent four or more years there with Millay’s sister
Norma working to catalog Edna’s work. At Steepletop, Oliver
met Molly Malone Cook, a talented photographer who
became Oliver’s life partner. They lived together in
Provincetown, Massachusetts, for approximately 40 years,
until Cook’s death in 2005. Like Alice Toklas who served as
Gertrude Stein’s gatekeeper, Cook protected Oliver from
unnecessary interruptions and served as her literary agent
and devotee, constantly encouraging her about her
remarkable talent.
Beyond monikers such as friend, teacher, Pulitzer Prize
winner is the heart-stopping label abused child, which
prompted Mary Oliver to seek places to hide. In 2011 during
an interview with Eunice Shriver, she let go of her secret for
the first time.
The Steiny Road Poet saw the film twice and can imagine
seeing it many times again. In the theaters, the duration is 91
minutes. On August 25, 2026, PBS American Masters will
begin airing an 81-minute version of the film.
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Writings
