Customer Reviews

One Secret Thing

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Sharon Olds writes beautiful poetry. This collection in particular brings out the range of her work. They are personal, private, provocative, and studied. It is almost like having a discussion about old times with your best friend. She seems to touch on shared experiences, common emotions, and a touch of social history. Perhaps it is because we are contemporaries or that we share many similar experiences, but I find myself returning to her poetry over and over again. She is one of the great modern American poets and commands respect. But much more than that she reaches out to her readers. She says this is the way I handled this maybe it will help you. The purists, who insist on form, scan, and such, might not appreciate the beauty and value of her poetry. But make no mistake, it is poetry and it is beautiful, personal, and useful. What ever your reaction, you will have one, and you should consider it carefully.

Actually I don't this IS a dark book. It works very hard to accomodate the illness and death of the poet's mother, to find moments of grace and of tenderness in what seems to have been a difficult life and a relationship characterized by struggle. As in all of Olds's work, there's a sort of examination in service of redemption going on here -- a looking hard at the stuff that experience offers, so we can find it what can be embraced or heldas good. I think that readers struck by the emotional force of this poet's work sometimes don't see how deeply moral it is -- that quest for what can be affirmed, and how a world in which violence or pain is dealt out can also be a location of blessing.

There is much to be said for picking through one own's life middens with a poetic tweezer - acknowledging life's warts, quirks, and farts: ecce humus hac ecce homus. At its best quiet, rather than heroic dignity of the animal in us obtains.
Sharon Olds has found such dignity in past books - and some of her poems are oustanding. The danger is that such poetry may become self-referential. There can be narcissism in contemplating one's own nose pickings. She has not escaped this curse fully this time.
Few artists have tackled successfully the theme of mental and physical decay. Ferdinand Hodler's obsessive sketches of his wife's dying face, as she lay ravaged by terminal cancer, say more about life and love than Renoir's fragrant, and in the end vacuously repetitive portraits of youth.
The last days of Olds' mother are the theme of numerous poems in the later part of this book. It is a difficult theme, for all to esily the living betray the breaking babble of the parting to settle personal accounts. The poem that gives the title to the collection ends with the line: "...my last chance to free myself". Way too much `I'.

I think Olds is a wonderful poet. This selection of poems are very dark and some are very disturbing. They serve their purpose but they are painful.