Felicity
Poems
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4.6 • 28 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"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.
