Re-reading Mary Oliver as an Adult Lesbian: A Review of Felicity

I know—a review of a Mary Oliver poetry collection? Do we really have to let the soft animal of our body love what it loves? To answer this, I offer you:

1. Mary Oliver was a lesbian!
2. She dedicated this collection to her partner, Anne Taylor
3. She never published “love” poetry but she couldn’t help it with this one (thank you, Anne)
4. Double entendre: Felicity is a woman’s name and is defined as “intense happiness” <3

Okay, hopefully that compels you to stay for the rest of my review where I will try to describe the utterly candid beauty of this collection and what it means to me (and should mean to you, a sapphic).

Felicity has three parts—The Journey, Love, and Felicity—and begins with an epigraph by Rumi: “You broke the cage and flew.” The first part comprises 19 poems, the second 18, and the third one poem.

It is no secret that Oliver wrote extensively about birds, flight, and freedom—”Wild Geese” is inscribed on so many t-shirts and art prints and stickers these days—and it should come as no surprise to you that this collection is full of meadowlarks and herons and redbirds. It also traipses through and around faith, trees, and bodies of water. She references John Muir and Emily Muir and her late friend, an Episcopal bishop. She talks of God and gods and questions and patience. She glides with the reader through each poem using caesura and line breaks and language that is accessible to everyone.

A recurring word (or sound) throughout this collection is laughter. The easy kind that bubbles out of the people you love. In each of these sections and poems exists opportunities—for slowness, for eagerness, for forgiveness, for forgetfulness, and for remembering. My favorite poems in the first section are “Roses” and “Storage.”

“Roses” (p. 7) stayed with me through the whole collection because of these lines:

“Wild roses,” I said to them one morning.

“Do you have the answers? And if you do,

would you tell me?”

The roses laughed softly. “Forgive us,”

they said. “But as you can see, we are

just now entirely busy being roses.”

So many of these poems contain dialogue like this, where the speaker asks a question and is left to accept the reality of life and “the journey,” which is to say that there are things we do not need answers for, and nature reflects that very idea in its confounding persistence.

“Storage” (p. 31) finds the speaker moving and confronted with the weight of their “things.” My favorite part of the poem is as follows:

…So one day I undid the lock

and called the trash man. He took

everything.

I felt like the little donkey when

his burden is finally lifted. Things!

Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful

fire! More room in your heart for love,

for the trees! For the birds who own

nothing—the reason they can fly.

How freeing it is to rid ourselves of tethers to social constructs that ultimately weigh us down and take our capacity for love and adventure with them. So simple, so good.

If you thought Mary Oliver wrote about the world and its natural wonders with reverence, I need you to read this book. The yearning that prompted the publication of this collection is all of the next section.

Love starts with another Rumi epigraph; a poem: “Someone who does not run / toward the allure of love / walks a road where nothing lives.”

If I put every quote and poem that I fell in love with for you here, this review would never end. I’ll say this: the second section is the season of spring as poetry. It is new beginnings, fresh breaths of crisp air, trust in the world and in the passage of time.

I will include one of the shorter poems, “I Did Think, Let’s Go About This Slowly” (p. 51), because I haven’t stopped thinking about it:

I did think, let’s go about this slowly.

This is important. This should take

some really deep thought. We should take

small thoughtful steps.

But, bless us, we didn’t.

This poem is the trepidation and trust of falling in love. It’s the magnetic pull to that person, to the feelings they evoke in you, something you can’t cheat or fake or steal. It is honest and open and all-encompassing. This part of the collection is about getting swept up in your love for someone, for the world, and being grateful for it. Ugh, thank you, Anne. This is the Mary Oliver I needed in high school for something to look forward to now, a decade later and finally being enraptured with my love for my girlfriend.

The final part, Felicity, starts with one more Rumi epigraph: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

I will let you read the final poem of the collection on your own, because I believe that’s how it should be read. It is a conversation between the poem and you—it offers you the opportunity to sit with it and be nourished in this life you get to live. In the journey it took you to get here and what more is to come.

I LOVE this collection. There is so much more in it for you to discover, so much desire and movement and wild and quiet. I think it speaks to such a beautiful experience of loving someone, expressly as a woman in love with another woman, and how it is both exhilarating and grounding.

Lexi McDonald (she/her) is a lesbian writer, teacher, and bookseller living in Pittsburgh, PA. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee and spends what free time she has reading and writing anything that could come close to the feelings that Portrait of a Lady on Fire evoke in her. You can find her on Instagram and Storygraph @lexim09.