Felicity was published by Penguin Press in 2015. The collection surprised readers who thought of Oliver primarily as a nature poet: these are love poems — direct, tender, and unguarded in ways her earlier work rarely permitted. Oliver was eighty; Cook had been dead for a decade; and the poems address both remembered love and the ongoing capacity for joy that survival demands.
“I Don’t Want to Be Demure or Respectable” announces the collection’s tone: defiant pleasure, the refusal to become cautious or grateful-in-a-diminished-way with age. “How I Go to the Woods” connects the erotic to the natural: the body that desires another body is the same body that delights in rain, wind, and the smell of earth. “Storage” remembers Cook directly — her habits, her presence, the shape of absence.
The poems are short — most under a page — and many have the quality of proverbs or blessings. Oliver in her eighties had achieved a compression that her earlier, more discursive work sometimes lacked: each poem makes a single gesture and stops. The collection sold enormously, as all of Oliver’s late books did — she was by this point the best-selling living poet in America by a wide margin.
Collecting Felicity
First edition (Penguin Press, 2015): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $10–$25
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation.
Love Poems
Felicity (2015) is Oliver’s most overtly romantic collection — poems about love, companionship, and gratitude written in the years after her partner Molly Malone Cook’s death. The poems are addressed to both the lost beloved and new possibilities of connection. The collection was a bestseller and became popular as a gift book, particularly for weddings and anniversaries. It is among Oliver’s most accessible and emotionally direct works.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are these autobiographical? Oliver was famously private, but the poems clearly draw on her long partnership with Cook (who died in 2005) and her subsequent experiences of solitude and rediscovery. The emotional authenticity is unmistakable even without biographical specifics.