Book description
Over the last five years, Sharon Olds' poetry has become widely read
and celebrated in Britain. Frank and exhilarating, sensual and
profound, the poems stare, unblinking, at sex and death and love -
showing these things to us in all their raw beauty.
This striking new collection is a sequence of poems that reaches
into the very wellspring of life. The poems take us back to the womb,
to childhood, to a searing sexual awakening, to the shock of birth,
the wonder and humour of parenthood - and finally to the depths of
adult love.
Always bold, musical and honest, The Wellspring plunges us
into the essence of experience. This is a highly charged, sinuous,
passionate book from one of the finest poets writing today.
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.
