Customer Reviews

The Wellspring: Poems

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I enjoyed this book for several reasons - Olds' poetry is brilliant without being haughty or laiden with archaic vocabulary or tired style. Her straightforward honesty coupled with her conciseness makes her poetry easy to read. Such honesty and conciseness are easy to "overdo" or do wrong. Olds avoids both such mistakes. She is honest without being brutal or giving the reader a sense that they are recieving too much information and she is concise without being too brief and leaving the reading wanting more. Her style tells the reader exactly what she means to say and leaves us feeling as if we have recieved the perfect dose of poetry.

I first came across Sharon Olds' poetry in a volume of the Best American Poetry edited by David Lehman. The poem, True Love, which ends the hardcover edition of Wellspring is a beautiful love song I first found there. That poem in no way prepared me for the depth and range of feeling found in Wellspring or the frank approach to the intimacy of family and life. She leads subtly to the deepest of emotions, exposing the rawness of life and it's wildest beauty. Riveted would be an apt description of reading this book. There is an invitation to invasion of privacy, which once taken leads the reader, first as witness and finally as partner, to a celebration of living........ Chester Morrison 3/27/97

Sharon Olds work is always well-crafted and honest. Shocking to some, perhaps. (Evidently it does disturb Catherine Ross, whose anti Sharon Olds crusade from April of this year is so transparent--each of her neg reviews written in the same voice, though supposedly penned by different reviewers.) As a man, I have always had a great respect for Olds' writing, her views into the world and her ability to somehow transform pain from the past into something greater and more life-affirming. You will love this book, unless you are profoundly prudish.

This is the most straightforward, urgent, honest poetry I have ever read. Not for fans of pretentious flowery language, for the squeamish, or for simpletons who don't see that there is beauty in complexity. I have yet to find another poet who can write with the clarity of Sharon Olds.

When it comes to poetry I read with a very skeptical eye. But, the more I read in this volume the more I slowed down to savor it. The sweep and power of these poems is unmistakable. In a world where knowing the right person can place a wanna-be's book next to Shakespeare's, it's nice to find the work of a fine craftsperson such as Sharon Olds. Her observations of her family and her candidness regarding sensuality make this book all the more special and important. Great reading.

The people who wrote the incredibly off negative reviews of this book do not understand contemporary poetry. If you don't like this book because of its real world language and content, which is only a small part of the book, by the way, you are a prude or a snob. Sharon Olds rocks--she is brave and honest and writes what is real. We don't live in Victorian England or the Middle Ages anymore, do we? These poems are beautifully written and are about life--love, kids, hate, childhood, everything. Thank God poetry does not have to only be about flowers and birds and oh how lovely everything is.

I read this book a few years ago when a friend loaned it to me, suggesting I read the sex poems as a way to free myself up in composing and revising my own. Those poems are in Part 2, and there are four parts, full of the rich, family themes and personal details characteristic of Sharon Olds's other books. I am so glad to own the book now, so I can go back to favorite, vivid poems about her lovers, kids, parents, and others in which she recreates experience in order to better understand why things fell out the way they did. I love how she is able to mix regret with inevitability, as if, as bad as things got in her family life, growing up, there was no way to prevent them. For example, she re-imagines "My Parents' Wedding Night, 1937" as a scary, bloody experience, full of foreboding: "The war / had not yet begun, they lay and slept / in blood and peace, no one knew what was coming."

Olds gathers her own identity from imagining her parents and explores her children's identities with poems about them; the book is also dedicated to her son and daughter, which, I confess, surprised me a bit, since that Part 2 is pretty darn open about sexual matters! I guess she feels they can handle it, and, hey, they are older now, anyway, than they appear in several of the poems. We can watch them grow up in her poems, in fact! Over all, her poems have been an inspiration to me as a writer, and she is one of my favorite poets!

Sharon Olds is a superb poet. She uses images to represent her emotions to the tee. You read her poems, marveled at the word usage, and the crispness in which she writes. You feel yourself living the poem with her. The one drawback of the book, if you aren't a parent I don't think you will grasp fully the poems on her children.

I will give the other reviews slight credence to the nasty words. some words could be considered 'nasty' words if you are a prude. but that's life. probably the most poignant and introspective book i've ever had the absolute joy to read. how vulnerable most of us would feel describing our most intimate, truthful emotions.

i'm sorry, i realize that people can disagree and not everyone is going to like similar things. but how this?

As someone who admired and returned to books like The Gold Cell and The Dead and the Living, I thought The Wellspring was a total disappointment. Olds' weak language and lines (her line breaks demonstrate no attention to craft, as if breaking a line on "the" or "a" makes the poem somehow more realistic, more sincere) constantly undermine her poems in this collection. She's basically writing dull prose and chopping it mercilessly into lines.

And her objectification of her children, who never emerge as people or full characters, is distasteful, since she uses them to her own ends.

All in all, a very weak collection.