One Secret Thing
by Sharon Olds
On This Page
Description
Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humor, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy--sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger--public and private--illuminate one another. As the book show more unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds's characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power. The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his first rotation in the emergency room. On the ancient boarding-school radio, in the attic hall, the announcer had given my boyfriend's name as one of two brought to the hospital after the sunrise service, the egg-hunt, the crash--one of them critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the stairwell banisters, at their lathing, the necks and knobs like joints and bones, the varnish here thicker here thinner--I had said Which one of them died, and now the world was an ant's world: the huge crumb of each second thrown, somehow, up onto my back, and the young, tired voice said my fresh love's name. from "Easter 1960" show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
“Sharon Olds' collections of poetry are always amazing, technically stellar, emotionally rich, and completely accessible. This collection is not quite as amazing as The Unswept Floor. The war poems are politically needed and right on target but leave something to be desired in execution. However, the poems chronicling the process undergone as she loses her mother are everything I could ever expect of such a masterful and seasoned poet. Truly amazing. All told, I still want to be Sharon Olds when I grow up.
I've been reading some collections of poetry--partly because April is Poetry Month, partly to find new poems for a class assignment, and partly for inspiration and motivation to get back to writing myself. I can't say that I enjoyed [One Secret Thing]. There were some startling images, particularly in a section of poems describing war. But Olds tends to be a confessional poet, and I am not fond of people putting their personal therapy into published poems. It just seems rather self-indulgent to me.
The new poems about her mother are very moving, and the war poems are extraordinary
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Lists
Tonikat reading completed on Librarything journals
329 works; 2 members
Author Information
39+ Works 3,788 Members
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco. She lives in New York City.
Awards and Honors
Awards
Distinctions
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2008
- Blurbers
- Redgrove, Peter; Ondaatje, Michael
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 138
- Popularity
- 235,469
- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (3.81)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
- ASINs
- 1
