If you love Mary Oliver (she wrote the beloved poem “Wild Geese” among many others), you will want to see this lovely piece about her in the Times.

It’s a travel article about the Provincetown, Mass landscape that the Pultizer Prize-winning poet has trod and loved and writen about for decades. There’s also a lovely slideshow that goes with it–photos of the area, especially Blackwater Pond (one of her most famous poems is about it) scroll while she reads her work.

Oliver declined to be interviewed for the article, saying she is private and prefers to let her poems speak for themselves. The article excerpts some of these words:

From In Blackwater Woods:

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

From a 1991 essay:

 “When will you have a little pity for/every soft thing/that walks through the world,/yourself included?”

You can read the whole article here: http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/travel/05oliver.html?pagewanted=1&sq=mary%20oliver&st=cse&scp=1

And here is the slideshow: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/05/travel/20090705-mary-oliver-audio-ss/index.html