Sharon Olds

Stag's Leap is a fantastic collection of poetry. I've always admired her writing, her bravery, her honesty, and her wisdom. But I found her ability, in this collection, to look with honesty and compassion at the painful dissolution of her thirty year marriage, and its aftermath, staggering.

It won the Pulitzer five years ago, and it deserves it.

Here are a couple of examples from it.

The Flurry

When we talk about when to tell the kids,
we are so together, so concentrated.
I mutter, “I feel like show more a killer.” “I’m
the killer”—taking my wrist—he says,
holding it. He is sitting on the couch,
the old indigo chintz around him,
rich as a night sea with jellies,
I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him,
as if within some chamber of matedness,
some dust I carry around me. Tonight,
to breathe its Magellanic field is less
painful, maybe because he is drinking
a wine grown where I was born—fog,
eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m
sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch
my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you want
to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that,
I tell him I will try to fall out of
love with him, but I feel I will love him
all my life. He says he loves me
as the mother of our children, and new troupes
of tears mount to the acrobat platforms
of my ducts and do their burning leaps.
Some of them jump straight sideways, and, for a
moment, I imagine a flurry
of tears like a whirra of knives thrown
at a figure, to outline it—a heart’s spurt
of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod
to it, it is my hope.

****

An ending excerpt from "Last Look":

and I saw, again, how blessed my life has been,
first, to be able to love,
then, to have the parting now behind me,
and not to have lost him when the kids were young,
and the kids now not at all to have lost him,
and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have
lost someone who could have loved me for life. show less

Longlisted for the National Book Award, Balladz by Sharon Olds was my introduction to the poet. Social media friends told me that Olds was a favorite poet. Although I read contemporary poetry in my younger years, I became out of touch after decades of living in rather isolated communities. I am thrilled to be able to discover all that I have been missing.

Olds style, so direct and filled with visceral images, can be jarring. The first section of the book are quarantine poems. Secluded in a show more rural cabin, Olds battles with loneliness–and mice, setting traps, dealing with the blood bath afterwards. She writes a poem to the centipede that she also kills, noting, “Of course I am a killer. I am/human.” And in the next poem she asks, “Is it impossible/for me to be good. Is it possible for us/ to try harder to kill this planet/slower. Would I kill this animal again/it it did its undulation above me/alone the wall. Is this the best that I can/do this morning to work against the killing/done in my name all over the earth.”

She writes angrily about the death of George Floyd. And in Anatomy Lesson for the Officer, of the human connection we share: “And that is a human throat you are kneeling/on. That is our throat, our brother’s,/our son’s, maybe our father’s throat. /That is your mother’s, your father’s, your son’s,/your daughter’s throat. That is your daughter’s throat.”

Amherst Ballads are in the style of Emily Dickinson, and I will need to take my time with them.

The Balladz section includes Best Friend Ballad, in which she remembers “the power of her house, and of the approach to it,” then recalls the girl’s death, praying “for a sleep tonight in which, 9 and 9, we can hold each other in a green dream.” I was transported back to when I was 9 years old, walking to my best friend’s 1900s farm house down the road, filled with grief knowing that she had died decades ago of disease.

And in Ballad Torn Apart, Olds vividly describes the car accident that killed a friend. In Album from a Previous Existence, she writes about her mother and childhood, and it is this harsh mother, who she talks about in earlier poems as tying her in a chair and beating her that is so hard to encounter, my own mother who, for all her flaws, was so giving, her love was like a tether that could not break with death.

Olds writes about her body, her self-image, the self-acceptance of growing old. “Now I’m better at talking to people without/thinking my face makes them want to throw up,”

I have not read all the poems. Poems on the death of her father and husband. There are some poems I need to go back to; I rushed through them, disturbed or confused. But then, is there any end to studying a poem, none the less nearly two hundred pages of poetry? It takes a life time. At least.

I received a free book from A. A. Knopf. My review is fair and unbiased. show less

Olds se entrega a la dura tarea de acompañar a su padre camino de la nada como el precio a pagar para repetir su historia, la historia de un padre y una hija, pero esta vez dentro de un sustrato de amor y generosidad.
Lo más impresionante de Olds es como convierte en poema la decadencia física de un cuerpo del que nos describe, desde la presencia tangible de la enfermedad hasta lo más profano de lo fisiológico del cuerpo de un hombre mezquino y estúpido.

A transcendent collection, truly. I read this as part of a poetry class curriculum and was taken aback by how truly and utterly absorbed I became with each subsequent poem.

For those who don't know, I'm an aspiring writer, but of prose not poetry. I've read (or have "or been exposed to") a selection of some of the greats such as Eliot, Dickenson, Dante and have loved most of them (Dante in particular). But in reading those works I always felt like an interloper, an almost tolerated visitor in show more a strange land. It never felt like a land that I could ever call 'mine'.

Upon entering the poetry seminar these feelings surged to the fore. My instructor was an imposing woman of unmatched intensity who could pick a part lazy writing and any lack of soul with a glance. I passed the class, somehow, and actually felt and even still feel that I truly earned that grade. But call it initiation, call it an extended sojourn, whatever, but I ingested more poetry in those three months than I had ever had before. It was an intense experience that, along with several other physical and mental factors, burned itself into my neural pathways and, I think, fundamentally altered my literary hard-wiring, as it were.

But to Miss Olds and her work, I feel inherently unequipped to say what I want to say outside of a few bloodless platitudes. This collection takes us through the process of a long, long, and incredibly painful divorce between a woman (presumably Olds) and her husband of decades. With full language that borders on prose without ever bursting or trivializing its source genre, we don't read these poems as experience them in a sensual labyrinth that takes lets us inhabit moments in the life (and death) of this marriage.

It's a painful read, but not maliciously so. Sharon Olds bares her soul to us with a soulful ache that resonates off the page and fills you to the brim. There's little in the way of 'ease' here. Though not surreal or absurdist (the poems possess a silken coherency) effort is asked of the reader to expand their literary sensibilities (attaining, if only momentarily, TS Eliot's vaunted 'poetic sensibility' as stated from his introduction to Barnes "Nightwood")to encompass the horizons Olds leads them across. Think of your eyes used to a darkness or soft light having now, only now, a dire need to take in the empyrean brilliance of these very painful, but very real, poetic landscapes.

It's visceral, brutal, but will leave you with the kind of ache that is almost loving, a pain you're glad to have because you know its presence means you're alive. show less