Mary Oliver

Not one of her ten planets sits in a fire sign. Four are in earth and four in water, with two in air, so the chart builds and registers and holds nothing that simply asserts itself. Oliver was an American poet whose nature writing found a readership far larger than poetry usually reaches, which is the rarest commercial outcome in that trade and tends to be held against the writer by the trade itself.

The Sun, Venus and Neptune sit inside four degrees of Virgo, which is an exceptionally tight group for three planets with nothing otherwise in common. Virgo is the sign of close attention to the ordinary small thing, described exactly. That is not a metaphor for her work, it is a description of the method: looking at a pond, or a grasshopper, for long enough and precisely enough that the looking becomes the poem. Identity, taste and the planet of the ineffable are all stationed there together.

The Moon answers from Aquarius, at an awkward angle to that Sun within a degree, so the private half of the chart sits apart from the Virgo group rather than joining it. Mars makes a quintile to Neptune at a third of a degree, which is skill rather than struggle in handling what cannot quite be stated, and Venus, Saturn and Uranus were all retrograde at her birth. A poet writing about ponds and herons for a readership of millions had to keep exactly that distance, or the work would have started being about the readership.

She died at Hobe Sound on 17 January 2019, at eighty three. The Moon that day was at its first quarter, eighty three per cent lit. That is the phase that acts decisively and usually has to break something in order to do it. The Sun had reached Capricorn, earth, the same element as her natal Virgo. Saturn, the planet of what lasts, made easy contact with her natal Venus one hundredth of a degree from exact: what she loved, met at zero distance by the planet of endurance.