Book description
Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once
intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new
self-awareness and sense of irony.
The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war,
serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humour, anger, and
compassion sing together with lyric energy - sometimes comic,
sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of
joy and danger - public and private - illuminate one another. As the
book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving
revision, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won
mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon
Olds's characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford and
Columbia universities. Her first book,
Satan Says
(1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her
second,
The Dead and the Living
, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the
National Book Critics Circle Award.
The Father
was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England, and
The Unswept
Room
was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics
Circle Award.
Stag's Leap
won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2012. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative
Writing Program at New York University and is one of the founders of
NYU's writing workshops for residents of Goldwater Hospital, and for
veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
