Synopses & Reviews
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 Oldss 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 poets continuing and amazing growth.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes 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.
About the Author
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and was educated at Stanford and Columbia. She was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and was one of the founders of the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Her work has received the Harriet Monroe Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. She lives in New York City.
Sharon Oldss The Dead and the Living; The Gold Cell; The Wellspring; The Father; Blood, Tin, Straw; and The Unswept Room are available in Knopf paperback.
From the Hardcover edition.
Table of Contents
From
Satan Says (1980)Indictment of Senior Officers
The Sisters of Sexual Treasure
Station
Monarchs
Infinite Bliss
The Language of the Brag
The Talk
I Could Not Tell
From The Dead and the Living (1984)
Ideographs
Photograph of the Girl
Race Riot, Tulsa, 1921
Of All the Dead That Have Come to Me, This Once
Miscarriage
My Father Snoring
The Moment
The Connoisseuse of Slugs
New Mother
Sex Without Love
Ecstasy
Exclusive
Rite of Passage
35⁄10
The Missing Boy
Bestiary
The One Girl at the Boys’ Party
From The Gold Cell (1987)
Summer Solstice, New York City
On the Subway
The Food-Thief
The Girl
The Pope’s Penis
When
I Go Back to May 1937
Alcatraz
Why My Mother Made Me
After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood
Cambridge Elegy
Topography
I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror
The Moment the Two Worlds Meet
Little Things
The Month of June: 13½
Looking at Them Asleep
From The Father (1992)
The Glass
His Stillness
The Lifting
The Race
Wonder
The Feelings
His Ashes
Beyond Harm
The Underlife
Natural History
The Ferryer
I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died
Waste Sonata
My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead
From The Wellspring (1996)
My Parents’ Wedding Night, 1937
Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942
Killing My Sister’s Fish
Mrs. Krikorian
First
Adolescence
May 1968
Bathing the New Born
41, Alone, No Gerbil
Physics
My Son the Man
First Formal
High School Senior
The Pediatrician Retires
This Hour
Full Summer
Am and Am Not
True Love
From Blood, Tin, Straw (1999)
The Promise
Know-Nothing
Dear Heart,
19
That Day
After Punishment Was Done with Me
What Is the Earth?
Leaving the Island
The Prepositions
1954
Cool Breeze
For and Against Knowledge
The Spouses Waking Up in the Hotel Mirror
You Kindly
Where Will Love Go?
The Protestor
The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb
The Talkers
First Thanksgiving
The Native
The Knowing
From The Unswept Room (2002)
Kindergarten Abecedarian
Bible Study: 71 B.C.E.
5¢ a Peek
Grey Girl
Still Life in Landscape
The Wedding Vow
His Costume
First Weeks
The Clasp
Diaphragm Aria
The Window
Fish Oil
Wonder as Wander
The Shyness
April, New Hampshire
The Untangling
The Learner
Heaven to Be
The Tending
Psalm
The Unswept