The Wellspring (Cape Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

OLDS, SHARON

History & Criticism

JONATHAN CAPE.

The Unswept Room is a dazzling collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and rhythm, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humour. From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical and emotional sensations seldom confronted in poetry. These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imaginations with unexpected word play, sprung rhythms and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.

The Unswept Room

Poetry

Jonathan Cape Ltd.

The new SELECTED POEMS from the major prize-winning, bestselling US poet. Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds's poetry 'pure fire in the hands' and cheered the 'roughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss'. This rich selection - made by the author - 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 fulfilment of marriage, the wonder of children - but each re-casting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits. A powerful distillation of the best work from one of America's most gifted and widely read poets, drawn from her seven published volumes, this is a testament to a remarkable writer's depth, range and continuing development.

Selected Poems

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.

The Father

In One Secret Thing, her ninth collection, Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems. The book opens with a poem in twelve parts, which focuses on fearsome images of war. This vision of strife between nations is followed by indelible new poems of conflict within a family. Here are poems of home in which anger, joy, danger, and desire sing together with lyric energy—sometimes comic, sometimes with unblinking forgiveness. The collection in its entirety is intense and harmonic, moving from minor key to major to minor, and it is rich with a level of self-awareness and irony new in Olds’s work. One Secret Thing is a double portrait, of a child and a difficult parent. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning. One Secret Thing culminates in a series of elegies of hard-won mourning. Throughout, the poems are shot through with Olds’s characteristic passion, zany imagination, and poetic power.

One Secret Thing

KNOPF

In this wise and intimate new book, Sharon Olds tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. As she carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending, Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip; the radical change in her sense of place in the world. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and who now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable “Stag’s Leap,” “When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.” Olds’s propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music—sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry she has yet given us.

Stag's Leap: Poems

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Blood, Tin, Straw: Poems

Winner of the 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize "She has written without embarrassment or apology, with remarkable passion and savagery and nerve, poems about family and family pathology, early erotic fascination, and sexual life inside marriage." --Amy Hempel Sharon Olds divides this new book into five sections--"Blood," "Tin," "Straw," "Fire," and "Light"--each made up of fourteen poems whose dominant imagery is drawn from one of these elements. The poems are rooted in different moments of an ordinary life and weave back and forth in time. Each section suggests the progression of the making of a soul cleansed by blood, forged by fire, suffused by light. Unafraid to confront the ecstatic or the brutal side of a woman's experience, Sharon Olds transforms her subjects with an alchemist's art, using language that is alternately casual and startling, fierce and transcendent. This is an intensely moving collection by one of our finest poets.

From Sharon Olds—a stunning new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor. From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical, emotional, and spiritual sensations that are seldom the stuff of poetry. These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.

Genre Fiction

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Books by OLDS, SHARON

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by OLDS, SHARON. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Wellspring (Cape Poetry)

The Unswept Room

Selected Poems

The Father

One Secret Thing

Stag's Leap: Poems

Blood, Tin, Straw: Poems

The Unswept Room

Blood, Tin, Straw: Poems

The Unswept Room