Sharon Olds

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 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.… (more)