Mary Oliver's Happiest Poems

I HAD GEARED myself up for a sort of Job-God exchange between Mary Oliver and some wild roses in the aptly named “Roses,” from her latest collection of poems, Felicity.

This is the scene: The narrator, full of poetic angst and existential fatalism, approaches some huddled roses and wonders in their direction: “What happens when the curtain goes / down and nothing stops it, not kissing, / not going to the mall, not the Super Bowl.”

I was ready for the roses to respond in a whirlwind full of rhetorical questions about the wonder and origin of creation. Instead they deflect the inquiry: “‘But as you can see, we are / just now entirely busy being roses.’”

And I laughed. In the past, Oliver’s poetry has caused me to cry over a dog (see “The First Time Percy Came Back”) and pray accidentally (see “The Summer Day”), but never before had her poems made me laugh.

In her 2014 collection Blue Horses, the flowers are “fragile blue.” They are “wrinkled and fading in the grass” until the next morning when somehow they crawl back up to the shrubs, bloom a bit, decide they want—just like all of us—“a little more of / life.” Now, in her latest collection of poetry, Oliver’s flowers are red, and they want as much life as they can get. They are carefree roses with a love of causal banter and a kind distaste for troubling existential questions.

These are not Oliver’s best poems, but they are her happiest, her most concise, her most openly religious. But the most talked-about difference in this collection is the presence of humans. Oliver has long been lauded for her ability to say so much about the human experience while rarely featuring human characters in her work. In Felicity, humans are “discovering / new ways to love.” So they find themselves kissing on beds and near bodies of water, wishing they could sing, giving their money away, and “drinking the sun.”

This book is essentially a collection of love poems: first to God, then to humans, all with the backdrop of the natural creation Oliver has devoted her life to paying attention to.

In Felicity, we discover a poet who has found God (on a pond, in a tree, on the backs of bowing lilies) and who has lost her subtlety. Her poems are shorter and her tone more pastoral. Mary Oliver is happy, it seems, and she has no time for any pretty ambiguity to obscure that important message.

She advises readers to “Let God and the world know you are grateful” without offering an accompanying metaphor. She writes, “Love is the one thing / you can’t steal” without any imagery for evidence. And, somehow, she does this successfully. These poems are playful and wise, but mainly they are just happy.

Writers are often advised to “show don’t tell.” This collection bumps up against that conventional wisdom in favor of much more whimsical truths. I’m still a believer in “show don’t tell,” but if you must just tell, tell it like Mary Oliver.