Felicity

by Mary Oliver

Overview

“A breezy, inviting collection of love poems that celebrates the divine as much as it does the natural world or human relationships . . . An eloquent celebration of simple joy from one of America’s most beloved poets.” —The Washington Post

“Oliver’s poems are thoroughly convincing—as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring.” —New York Times Book Review

Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, celebrates love in this 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780698407473
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/13/2015
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	1,034,958
File size:	843 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Born in a small town in Ohio, Mary Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28. Over the course of her long career, she has received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She has led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Bennington College, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching.

Table of Contents

The Journey

Don't Worry 3

Walking to Indian River 5

Roses 7

Moments 9

The World I Live In 11

Do the Trees Speak? 13

I Am Pleased to Tell You 15

Leaves and Blossoms along the Way 17

I Wake Close to Morning 19

Meadowlark 21

The Wildest Storm 23

Cobb Creek 25

Nothing Is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About 27

Whistling Swans 29

Storage 31

Humility 33

For Tom Shaw S.S.J.E. 35

That Tall Distance 37

This Morning 39

Love

When Did It Happen? 43

The First Day 45

I Know Someone 47

No, I'd Never Been to This Country 49

I Did Think, Let's Go About This Slowly 51

This and That 53

How Do I Love You? 55

That Little Beast 57

What This Is Not 59

Everything that Was Broken 61

Except for the Body 63

Not Anyone Who Says 65

The Pond 67

Late spring 69

A House, or a Million Dollars 71

I Don't Want to Lose 73

I Have Just Said 75

The Gift 77

Felicity

A Voice from I Don't Know Where 81

Acknowledgments 83

Note 85

Editorial Reviews

09/21/2015
“Only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one,” writes Pulitzer Prize–winner Oliver (Dog Songs) in a collection that serves as an ecopoetic, transcendentalist guidebook for the wandering soul. Replete with endearing adages and prophetic wisdom, and subdivided by Rumi quotes, Oliver’s three sections—”The Journey,” “Love,” and “Felicity”—follow the guiding voices of nature and sacred love. She expresses gratitude for the embrace of her partner—“I can’t remember/ everything—// so many years!/ Are the morning kisses/ the sweetest/ or the evenings// or the inbetweens?/ All I know/ is that ‘thank you’ should appear/ somewhere”—and explains that humans’ need for embrace is why “the body/ gladly lingers in the wind or the rain” when one is lonely. Leading readers to appreciate the overlooked all around them, Oliver takes notice of birds, assured that “the reason they can fly” is because they own nothing. She also looks toward a cricket who no longer sings, redeeming him in his late age by reminding readers that this silence “doesn’t mean/ he hasn’t been an excellent cricket/ all his life.” Oliver’s longtime fans and those who seek spiritual renewal will find themselves a worthy guide in this sagacious, pantheistic read. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Oliver’s longtime fans and those who seek spiritual renewal will find themselves a worthy guide in this sagacious, pantheistic read.” —Publishers Weekly 

“A breezy, inviting collection of love poems that celebrates the divine as much as it does the natural world or human relationships . . . An eloquent celebration of simple joy from one of America’s most beloved poets.” —The Washington Post

“One of the astonishing aspects of Oliver’s work is the consistency of tone over this long period [of her career]. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets . . . There is no complaint in Ms. Oliver’s poetry, no whining, but neither is there the sense that life is in any way easy . . . These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward.” —Stephen Dobyns, New York Times Book Review

“It has always seemed, across her 15 books of poetry, five of prose and several essays and chapbooks, that Mary Oliver might leave us at any minute. Even a 1984 Pulitzer Prize couldn’t pin her to the ground. She’d change quietly into a heron or a bear and fly or walk off forever. Her poems contain windows, doors, transformations, hints on how to escape the body; there’s the ‘glamour of death’ and the ‘life after the earth-life’ . . . The new poems teem with creation: ravens, bees, hawks, box turtles, bears. The landscape is Thoreauvian: ponds, marsh, grass and cattails; New England’s ‘salt brightness’; and fields in ‘pale twilight.’ The poems from Why I Wake Early (2004) are, in contrast, full of white things and ‘untrimmable light’; from Owls and Other Fantasies (2003), of watery sounds, singing, rain; from West Wind (1997), of starry distances and traveling.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review

“In a region that has produced most of the nation’s poet laureates, it is risky to single out one fragile 71-year-old bard of Provincetown. But Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1984, is my choice for her joyous, accessible, intimate observations of the natural world. Her “Wild Geese” has become so popular it now graces posters in dorm rooms across the land. But don’t hold that against her. Read almost anything in New and Selected Poems. She teaches us the profound act of paying attention—a living wonder that makes it possible to appreciate all the others.” —Renée Loth, Boston Globe

“Oliver’s poems are thoroughly convincing—as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring.” —New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

★ 11/15/2015
"Make room in your heart for love,/ for the trees! For the birds who own/ nothing—the reason they can fly." It shouldn't surprise readers that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Oliver (American Primitive; Blue Horses), long lauded for poems that explore her close ties with nature, also writes love poems. In this newest volume, she meditates on her journey along the paths of aging and love while still communing with nature, Rumi, God, and almost all that crosses her path: "You wouldn't believe what once or/ twice I have seen. I'll just/ tell you this:/ only if there are angels in your head will you/ ever, possibly, see one?" Oliver's poems are intimate conversations, with pacing that is easy and familiar. Love is at the heart of these small meditations. VERDICT Because she has the gift of finding the sacred in nearly everything, Oliver is one of those poets to whom readers return. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 6/14/15.]—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal