to stay." Oliver valued her privacy and gave very few interviews, saying she preferred for her writing to speak for itself. Death In 2012, Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer, but was treated and given a "clean bill of health." Oliver died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019, at the age of 83. Critical reviews Maxine Kumin describes Mary Oliver in the Women's Review of Books as an "indefatigable guide to the natural world, particularly to its lesser-known aspects." Reviewing Dream Work for The Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America's finest poets: "visionary as Emerson [... she is] among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey." New York Times reviewer Bruce Bennetin stated that the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection American Primitive, "insists on the primacy of the physical" while Holly Prado of Los Angeles Times Book Review noted that it "touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity." Vicki Graham suggests Oliver over-simplifies the affiliation of gender and nature: "Oliver's celebration of dissolution into the natural world troubles some critics: her poems flirt dangerously with romantic assumptions about the close association of women with nature that many theorists claim put the woman writer at risk." In her article "The Language of Nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver", Diane S. Bond echoes that "few feminists have wholeheartedly appreciated Oliver's work, and though some critics have read her poems as revolutionary reconstructions of the female subject, others remain skeptical that identification with nature can empower women." In The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Sue Russell notes that "Mary Oliver will never be a balladeer of contemporary lesbian life in the vein of Marilyn Hacker, or an important political thinker like Adrienne Rich; but the fact that she chooses not to write from a similar political or narrative stance makes her all the more valuable to our collective culture." Selected awards and honors 1969/70 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. 1980 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for American Primitive 1991 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light 1992 National Book Award for Poetry for New and Selected Poems 1998 Lannan Literary Award for poetry 1998 Honorary Doctorate from The Art Institute of Boston 2003 Honorary membership into Phi Beta Kappa from