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Few modern poets are as readily quotable — and indeed as widely quoted — as Mary Oliver, the late Pulitzer winner whose graceful but plainly worded reflections on the natural world have been taken to heart by millions
as mantras for a calmer, more mindful way of life. Depending on who you talk to, that’s a testament to either the brilliance or the banality of her work. Precious few poets get the privilege of becoming vastly popular in their lifetime, but with that profile often comes pushback from certain corners of the literary world: a suspicion that any verse understood by so many can’t be all that profound. An appropriately accessible and open-hearted documentary on her life and legacy, Sasha Waters’ “Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World” doesn’t engage with such criticism at an academic level; it prefers to answer it with the emotive power of Oliver’s own words.
It does so upfront, opening on one of Oliver’s many celebrity admirers, Stephen Colbert, as he attempts to recite her most well-known poem, “The Summer Day.” Well before he gets to its famous closing lines (“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”), he falters, tearily overcome with feeling. He’s hardly the first person to be made verklempt by a poem that has become a staple at wedding and funeral services alike: It’s the most crystalline example of Oliver’s ability to layer outwardly unremarkable everyday imagery, usually pulled from nature, with searching existential implications.
When reduced to decontextualized soundbites, however, Oliver’s words can sound pat or epigrammatic in ways that don’t necessarily reflect her philosophy — just see how many times her line “joy is not made to be a crumb” has been used and abused by food marketers and culinary influencers. Such are the perils of popularity, all the more ironic because Oliver never intended to be a populist. A private and reticent person, protective of her queer identity and relationships, she wrote for herself, inspired by her constant and sustaining love of the outdoors: “Looking at the world, whatever shape my finances were in, was the important part of my life,” she says in one archival interview extract.
Waters’ film tells Oliver’s life story from a respectful distance, not seeking an unprecedentedly intimate acquaintance with its subject — which is just as well, since the loved ones and associates interviewed here have no interest in betraying her confidence. “If I thought of something that she wouldn’t want me to tell you, I wouldn’t tell you,” says the most surprising and entertaining of the film’s talking heads: filmmaker John Waters (no relation to this film’s director), whom we learn became close with Oliver and her partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, when they were near-neighbors in Provincetown, Massachusetts. An equally unlikely friend, Maria Shriver, is similarly guarded: “I really protect my conversations with Mary,” she says.
Still, abetted by archival photos and video, a poignant picture emerges of a life lived stringently on Oliver’s own terms: Once a lonely child, she found fellowship not just in like-minded artists and social outsiders, but in the flora and fauna that were equally important to her personal ecosystem. John Waters, discreet but still a rich source of anecdotes and human insight, helps ground and demystify a woman sometimes popularly tagged with a spiritual earth-mother aura — whether informing us of her chain-smoking habit or drolly recounting the time she was bit by a badger. Oliver may have lived her own world to some extent, but that world was still the real one.
Meanwhile, luminaries ranging from Oprah Winfrey to Steve Buscemi to V (the author and playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler) to fellow American poets like Major Jackson and Ada Limón, are on hand to provide more laudatory tributes to Oliver’s work — detailing both what it has meant to them, and to the culture at large.
The diversity of voices assembled is a suitable reflection of the subject’s reach and impact, and while a more provocative film might have included more skeptics or critics — perhaps one to account for why, as is incredulously noted here, Oliver never received a full-length review in the New York Times — Waters’ doc is unabashedly a celebration, and persuasive as such. It’s sure to delight the poet’s fans in large numbers when it airs on PBS in late August, following a limited theatrical run that begins this weekend. (It premiered as the opening film of the True/False documentary festival in March.) On its subject, meanwhile, “Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World” fills in enough color and context to prompt viewers to return to the poems themselves, to seek the writer in words that so many readers have claimed for themselves.
