The Father [Hardcover]

Sharon Olds (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 28, 1992

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

These startling poems work and rework the poet's experience of her father dying from cancer. Many take place at his deathbed, detailing the physical horror of the disease as if to exorcise it: "When they empty out his catheter bag,/ pouring the pale, amber fluid/ into the hospital measuring cup, it is/neither good nor bad, it is only/ the body." But at its heart, this book is about the poet's coming to terms with a father she has hated: an alcoholic, divorced from her mother, and at times cruel and remote. Olds handles this very difficult terrain directly, without sentimentality: "I would have traded/ places with anyone raised on love,/but how would anyone raised on love/bear this death?" At its best, her work calls to mind James Wright's stunning leaps from the physical into prayer: "Yes the tears came/ out like juice and sugar from the fruit--/ the skin thins and breaks and rips, there are/ laws on this earth and we live by them." Psalm-like, these poems make beauty from pain without softening it. For most collections.
- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Sharon Olds's poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss. The elegy is one of the root-forms of poetry, but the fifty-two poems in Sharon Olds' The Father, radiating from a death, feel new. The death of the father - anticipated, witnessed, remembered - draws from Olds an extraordinary dry attentiveness... It is a wonderful book. Independent on Sunday --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 79 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (April 28, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679411275
• ISBN-13: 978-0679411277
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,084,013 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Uninspiring compared to earlier work., May 13, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Father (Paperback)

This is the fourth book I have read by Sharon Olds. I found The Father to be less enjoyable than her other collections of poetry such as Satan Says or The Dead and the Living.

In The Father, it seems that Olds has finally come to terms with her father and forgiven him for the past, but I am not sure if Olds just doesn't have anything left to say, or if I'm just not interested in hearing it. To me, The Father seems to be typical and redundant-in content and style. Don't get me completely wrong though, there were a few poems I really liked, and several metaphors here and there really caught my attention. As usual, Olds was very frank and direct about her emotions, but overall I felt very uninspired by this collection of poems. By the end I was just bored and ready to be done with the book. It is like reading someone who doesn't know what to write about but feels compelled to write anyway. If you have never read Olds, I would recommend her earlier work first.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Authentic encounter with the experience of my father's death, May 17, 1999

By 

Chauncey Bell (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Father (Paperback)

My father died a month ago, after four years of illness. I was with him when he died, and I went to Amazon to look for a book that would help me to interact with the extraordinary experience of the death of my father. Sharon Olds' book was far more than I had hoped to have been able to find. I have been carrying it with me for two weeks now and reading passages over and over. She has written the poems I would have written had I been a poet in the middle of the experience of my father's dying. Exceptional and moving.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Father, December 24, 1999

By 

Mark Archer (Ridgecrest, Calif.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Father (Paperback)

This is one of the most eloquent readings I have ever come across. Ms. Olds powerful use of metaphor to describe the tormented relationship she had with her father is insightful and inspiring. This should be required reading for any young female (indeed people of all genders and ages) struggling to find a means for remaining not only sane, inspite of the insanity in to which some of us are born, but how to remain caring, compassionate and creatively involved with your surroundings, despite the chaos of whatever personal hell you must survive to do so.