Felicity

by Mary Oliver

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 96
Rating:

Synopsis:

Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, celebrates love in her new collection of poems.

If I have any secret stash of poems, anywhere, it might be about love, not anger, Mary Oliver once said in an interview. Finally, in her stunning new collection, Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver's love poems. Here, great happiness abounds. Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person. She opens our eyes again to the territory within our own hearts; to the wild and to the quiet. In these poems, she describes--with joy--the strangeness and wonder of human connection. As in Blue Horses, Dog Songs, and A Thousand Mornings, with Felicity Oliver honors love, life, and beauty.

Mary Oliver’s poetry is gorgeous. This was the first of her collections I’d read, though I’d undoubtedly come across her poems before, and I loved how readable and accessible it feels — she isn’t trying to mystify, and her poems share her joy in the world, sometimes even in moments that someone else could make into a tragedy.

It’s actually hard to pick favourites, but here’s one in its entirety that I loved, ‘Everything That Was Broken’:

Everything that was broken has
forgotten it’s brokenness. I live
now in a sky-house, through every
window the sun. Also your presence.
Our touching, our stories. Earthy
and holy both. How can this be, but
it is. Every day has something in
it whose name is Forever.

Definitely a poet I want to read more of.

Rating: 5/5 (“loved it”)