Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002

Description

A powerful collection from one of our most gifted and widely read poets–117 of her finest poems drawn from her seven published volumes.

Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds’s poetry “pure fire in the hands” and cheered the “roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss.” This rich selection exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited–the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfillment of marriage, the wonder of children–but each recasting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits.

Strike Sparks is a testament to this remarkable poet’s continuing and amazing growth.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Satan Says (Pitt Poetry Series)

Description

Commenting on Sharon Olds' debut, Linda Pastan wrote that Olds was "clearly a poet to be reckoned with." No kidding. Olds has gone on to create an impressively bold body of work. Notice here "The Language of the Brag," in which Olds describes the heroic deed of childbirth: "I have done what you wanted to do Walt Whitman/ . . . this glistening verb,/and I am putting my proud American boast/ right here with the others." Amen.

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The Father

Description

The Father is often regarded as Sharon Olds’ most important and powerful single book. In its poems, Olds narrows her focus to a sequence of startling and provocative poems about a daughter’s final days with her dying father. It is an elegant, passionate examination of love and loss, a bittersweet, transcendent elegy.

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The Dead and the Living

Description

The 1983 Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.

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Gold Cell (Knopf Poetry Series)

Description

A new collection by the much praised poet whose second book THE DEAD AND THE LIVING, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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The Wellspring: Poems

Description

Sharon Olds's dazzling new collection is a sequence of poems that reaches into the very wellspring of life. The poems take us back to the womb, and from there on to childhood, to a searing sexual awakening, to the shock of childbirth, to the wonder and humor of parenthood--and, finally, to the depths of adult love.

Always bold, musical, honest, these poems plunge us into the essence of experience. This is a highly charged, beautifully organized collection from one of the finest poets writing today.

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The theme of Sharon Olds' fifth volume of poetry, The Wellspring is family and the sexual and sensual nature of the creation and sustenance of life--most often her own. From a time in her mother's life that preceded her own birth ("half of me/was deep in her body, dyed egg") to her father's testicles ("my brothers/and sisters are there, swimming by the cinerous/millions") to her son (who "waited inside me so many years/egg in my side before I was born"), her place in the reproductive life of her family is paramount. Even when the ostensible subject of a poem is as public as a campus antiwar demonstration, as in "May 1968," the real topic is creation and procreation: "The mounted police moved, near us/while we sang ... /if my period did not come tonight/I was pregnant."

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