Book description
Sharon Olds divides this new book into five sections - 'Blood',
'Tin', ' 'Straw', ' 'Fire' and 'Light' - each made up of fourteen
poems whose dominant imagery is drawn from one of these elements. The
poems are rooted in different moments of an ordinary life and weave
back and forth in time. Each section suggests the progression of the
making of a soul cleansed by blood, forged by fire, suffused by light.
Unafraid to confront the ecstatic or the brutal side of a woman's
experience, Sharon Olds transforms the subjects with an alchemist's
art, using language that is alternately casual and startling, fierce
and transcendent. This is an intensely moving collection by one of
America's finest poets.
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. 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.
