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Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002
A powerful collection from one of our most gifted and widely read poets–117 of her finest poems drawn from her seven published volumes.
Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds’s poetry “pure fire in the hands” and cheered the “roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss.” This rich selection exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited–the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfillment of marriage, the wonder of children–but each recasting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits.
Strike Sparks is a testament to this remarkable poet’s continuing and amazing growth.
Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds’s poetry “pure fire in the hands” and cheered the “roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss.” This rich selection exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited–the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfillment of marriage, the wonder of children–but each recasting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits.
Strike Sparks is a testament to this remarkable poet’s continuing and amazing growth.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published September 28, 2004
69 people are currently reading
902 people want to read
About the author
Sharon Olds
86 books764 followersBorn in San Francisco on November 19, 1942, Sharon Olds earned a B.A. at Stanford University and a Ph.D. at Columbia University.
Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds's following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
About Olds's poetry, one reviewer for the New York Times said, "Her work has a robust sensuality, a delight in the physical that is almost Whitmanesque. She has made the minutiae of a woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have preoccupied other poets."
Olds's numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in more than a hundred collections.
Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006. She lives in New York City.
Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds's following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
About Olds's poetry, one reviewer for the New York Times said, "Her work has a robust sensuality, a delight in the physical that is almost Whitmanesque. She has made the minutiae of a woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have preoccupied other poets."
Olds's numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in more than a hundred collections.
Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006. She lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 82 reviews
February 12, 2024
This collection of poems is the best example of showcasing just how vast and exciting the world of poetry can be.
Sharon Olds was a fresh find for me. I didn't know her, and I didn't have to try to like or understand her. I just easily got sucked into her world and her words by reading the first poem of this collection, Indictment of Senior Officers from her book Satan Says.
It's bold, exciting and innovative. It's just impossible for me to not like a book that its concept is "writing and saying exactly the things that you should not be saying". She just doesn't hold back from exploring themes such as motherhood, sexuality, marriage and the relations inside a family. She hits you with her witty words and smart prose.
The best way to kickstart my 2024 reading journey.
Sharon Olds was a fresh find for me. I didn't know her, and I didn't have to try to like or understand her. I just easily got sucked into her world and her words by reading the first poem of this collection, Indictment of Senior Officers from her book Satan Says.
It's bold, exciting and innovative. It's just impossible for me to not like a book that its concept is "writing and saying exactly the things that you should not be saying". She just doesn't hold back from exploring themes such as motherhood, sexuality, marriage and the relations inside a family. She hits you with her witty words and smart prose.
The best way to kickstart my 2024 reading journey.
February 7, 2024
Beautiful in an overwhelming way. I want to read again soon.
April 15, 2012
Strike Sparks, a collection of poems from a vast body of work by Sharon Olds, reads like an autobiography - a poetic scrapbook of images, memories and experiences, some so intense that the reader is haunted by a scene as if it had come to life on a screen instead of via the written word.
The New York Times has said, "Her work has a robust sensuality, a delight in the physical that is almost Whitmanesque. She has made the minutiae of a woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have preoccupied other poets."
I would add the words brutal and despairing to her concept of sensuality. Explicit sex, rape and incest are themes throughout her poems, and Olds is obsessed with the body, either its insatiable desire to connect with other bodies sexually or its ultimate fragility, poignantly expressed in all of the poems about her father and his death in the collection The Father.
"Where Will Love Go?" from the collection Blood, Tin, Straw reflects these preoccupations:
Where will love go? When my father
died, and my love could no longer shine
on the oily, drink-contused slopes of his skin,
then my love for him lived inside me,
and lived wherever the fog they made of him
coiled like a spirit. And when I die
my love for him will live in my vapor
and live in my children, some of it
still rubbed into the grain of the desk my father left me
and in the oxblood pores of the leather chair which he
sat in . . .
[it continues]
. . . Even when the children
have died, our love will live in their children
and still be here in the arm of the chair,
locked in it, like the secret structure of matter,
but what if we ruin everything,
the earth burning like a human body,
storms of soot wreathing it
in permanent winter? Where will love go? [it continues]
Because I am on the eve of becoming an empty-nester, the poems I most enjoyed were ones about motherhood - the conflicting feelings and fears that arise while raising one's children. "The Summer Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb" is an insightful expression of a near-universal societal experience of sending one's child off for the first time. And the poem that introduced me to Olds is about her daughter; since it is my personal favorite, here it is in its entirety:
"First Thanksgiving"
When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a
soul in a body. She came into my life the
second great arrival, fresh
from the other world - which lay, from within him,
within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,
week after week, the moon rising,
and setting, and waxing - whirling, over the months,
in a steady blur, around our planet.
Now she doesn't need love like that, she has
had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she's fast asleep, I'll exult
to have her in that room again,
behind that door! As a child, I caught
bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,
looked into their wild faces,
listened to them sing, then tossed them back
into the air - I remember the moment the
arc of my toss swerved, and they entered
the corrected curve of their departure."
Olds poetry is not for the faint of heart. Many of her images are brutally explicit, and she has no problem comparing giving a blowjob to explorers discovering a lost city ("The Sisters of Sexual Treasure"). If you are willing to venture into her personal, vast forest of the human shadow, you will emerge scathed but possibly more sentient.
The New York Times has said, "Her work has a robust sensuality, a delight in the physical that is almost Whitmanesque. She has made the minutiae of a woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have preoccupied other poets."
I would add the words brutal and despairing to her concept of sensuality. Explicit sex, rape and incest are themes throughout her poems, and Olds is obsessed with the body, either its insatiable desire to connect with other bodies sexually or its ultimate fragility, poignantly expressed in all of the poems about her father and his death in the collection The Father.
"Where Will Love Go?" from the collection Blood, Tin, Straw reflects these preoccupations:
Where will love go? When my father
died, and my love could no longer shine
on the oily, drink-contused slopes of his skin,
then my love for him lived inside me,
and lived wherever the fog they made of him
coiled like a spirit. And when I die
my love for him will live in my vapor
and live in my children, some of it
still rubbed into the grain of the desk my father left me
and in the oxblood pores of the leather chair which he
sat in . . .
[it continues]
. . . Even when the children
have died, our love will live in their children
and still be here in the arm of the chair,
locked in it, like the secret structure of matter,
but what if we ruin everything,
the earth burning like a human body,
storms of soot wreathing it
in permanent winter? Where will love go? [it continues]
Because I am on the eve of becoming an empty-nester, the poems I most enjoyed were ones about motherhood - the conflicting feelings and fears that arise while raising one's children. "The Summer Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb" is an insightful expression of a near-universal societal experience of sending one's child off for the first time. And the poem that introduced me to Olds is about her daughter; since it is my personal favorite, here it is in its entirety:
"First Thanksgiving"
When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a
soul in a body. She came into my life the
second great arrival, fresh
from the other world - which lay, from within him,
within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,
week after week, the moon rising,
and setting, and waxing - whirling, over the months,
in a steady blur, around our planet.
Now she doesn't need love like that, she has
had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she's fast asleep, I'll exult
to have her in that room again,
behind that door! As a child, I caught
bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,
looked into their wild faces,
listened to them sing, then tossed them back
into the air - I remember the moment the
arc of my toss swerved, and they entered
the corrected curve of their departure."
Olds poetry is not for the faint of heart. Many of her images are brutally explicit, and she has no problem comparing giving a blowjob to explorers discovering a lost city ("The Sisters of Sexual Treasure"). If you are willing to venture into her personal, vast forest of the human shadow, you will emerge scathed but possibly more sentient.
September 18, 2017
I really enjoyed this collection of poetry and poetry is something I rarely choose to read. However, after being assigned the first 100 pages or so to read for a class, I was interested enough in Sharon Old's bold, confessional-style that I decided to read the last 80 pages on my own. Her poems can get quite graphic-many of her poems are about sexual acts-but the honesty in her words and the beautiful imagery she uses is very captivating.
Here are a couple of poems that stuck with me:
"Infinite Bliss"
When I first saw snow cover the air
with its delicate hoofprints, I said I would never
live where it did not snow, and when
the first man tore his way into me,
and tore up the passageway,
and came to the small room, and pulled the
curtain aside that I might enter, I knew I could
never live apart from them
again, the strange race with their massive
bloodied hooves. Today we lay in our
small bedroom, dark gold with
reflected snow, and while the flakes climbed
delicately down the sky, you
came into me, pressing aside
the curtain, revealing the small room,
dark gold with reflected snow,
where we lay, and where you entered me and
pressed the curtain aside, revealing
the small room, dark gold with
reflected snow, where we lay.
"New Mother"
A week after our child was born,
you cornered me in the spare room
and we sank down on the bed.
You kissed me and kissed me, my milk undid its
burning slipknot through my nipples,
soaking my shirt. All week I had smelled of milk,
fresh milk, sour. I began to throb:
my sex had been torn easily as cloth by the
crown of her head, I'd been cut with a knife and
sewn, the stitches pulling at my skin-and the
first time you're broken, you don't know
you'll be healed again, better than before.
I lay in fear and blood and milk
while you kissed and kissed me, your lips hot and swollen
as a teenage boy's, your sex dry and big,
all of you so tender, you hung over me,
over the nest of the stitches, over the
splitting and tearing, with the patience of someone who
finds a wounded animal in the woods
and stays with it, not leaving its side
until it is whole, until it can run again.
Here are a couple of poems that stuck with me:
"Infinite Bliss"
When I first saw snow cover the air
with its delicate hoofprints, I said I would never
live where it did not snow, and when
the first man tore his way into me,
and tore up the passageway,
and came to the small room, and pulled the
curtain aside that I might enter, I knew I could
never live apart from them
again, the strange race with their massive
bloodied hooves. Today we lay in our
small bedroom, dark gold with
reflected snow, and while the flakes climbed
delicately down the sky, you
came into me, pressing aside
the curtain, revealing the small room,
dark gold with reflected snow,
where we lay, and where you entered me and
pressed the curtain aside, revealing
the small room, dark gold with
reflected snow, where we lay.
"New Mother"
A week after our child was born,
you cornered me in the spare room
and we sank down on the bed.
You kissed me and kissed me, my milk undid its
burning slipknot through my nipples,
soaking my shirt. All week I had smelled of milk,
fresh milk, sour. I began to throb:
my sex had been torn easily as cloth by the
crown of her head, I'd been cut with a knife and
sewn, the stitches pulling at my skin-and the
first time you're broken, you don't know
you'll be healed again, better than before.
I lay in fear and blood and milk
while you kissed and kissed me, your lips hot and swollen
as a teenage boy's, your sex dry and big,
all of you so tender, you hung over me,
over the nest of the stitches, over the
splitting and tearing, with the patience of someone who
finds a wounded animal in the woods
and stays with it, not leaving its side
until it is whole, until it can run again.
August 21, 2020
This has a sampling of each one of Olds' books, which I now suspect is not the best way to introduce oneself to a poet. I fell in love with several poems along the way, particular in the first few books of the collection, and I managed to frustrate my conception of Olds as hard and overly stark (which was the fault of only reading her few anthologized poems); but I eventually grew bored and frustrated with the same voice, I think because I wasn't experiencing them in any other context. I plan on picking up one of the individual books in the future, hopefully to get a more digestible experience.
November 1, 2023
"I wanted to watch my father die
because I hated him. Oh, I loved him,
my hands cherished him, laying him out,
but I had feared him so..."
because I hated him. Oh, I loved him,
my hands cherished him, laying him out,
but I had feared him so..."
September 1, 2008
Sharon Olds is a great poet. She is vulgar and bold, but still graceful, funny and elegant. She's not afraid of saying things that aren't usually said. Please read at least a few of her poems.
I recommend: The Girl (this one is really intense), The Sisters of Sexual Treasure, The Pope's Penis
I recommend: The Girl (this one is really intense), The Sisters of Sexual Treasure, The Pope's Penis
September 25, 2016
I love her way with words, her pacing, her tone, her imagery. But her focus on sex and sexual organs (even, pseudo-creepily, when the topic of her poem is her father, or her children) just gets boring after awhile. If she wrote a book with another theme, I'd be all over it.
July 29, 2012
Even better than reading her work - look her up on YouTube reading them herself. Amazing.
October 13, 2024
Visceral, horny, worshipful, pained, metaphysical, meaty, majestic. “Connoisseuse of Slugs” and “Monarchs” are among my favorites. I am amazed most at the way she can say almost the same thing twice and make it live independently, narrowing the gap between phrases as she maintains the gap between things. “May 1968” also a masterful performance of the same words being the same/different things, shoe, belly, stick, curve. “First Thanksgiving” also amazing. A few of hers that I adore aren’t in this collection- oh well, I guess- I think actually the collections work better on their own but it’s good to see the scope of her art as she evolves, poems get longer and denser, imagery more celestial. Feels like some Donne influence there, even.
November 15, 2024
le pondría 4,5 pero alguien creó goodreads y decidió no volver a actualizarlo nunca más
autora increíble me ha encantado y los temas no te dejan indiferente definitivamente me tengo que leer más cosas suyas. a medida que iba leyendo me quedaba loca con el dominio del idioma y mi mente de traductora no podía parar de pensar en el infierno que sería traducir eso pero bueno not my problem yall take care tho
autora increíble me ha encantado y los temas no te dejan indiferente definitivamente me tengo que leer más cosas suyas. a medida que iba leyendo me quedaba loca con el dominio del idioma y mi mente de traductora no podía parar de pensar en el infierno que sería traducir eso pero bueno not my problem yall take care tho
November 14, 2022
best poetry book i've read
October 16, 2019
A powerful collection of poems which depicts aspects of life and includes subjects such as pain, childhood, and love. She makes a simple word seem more than just a word, like there's more to a word.
January 20, 2022
Strike Sparks contains a selection of poems from
Satan Says
,
The Dead and the Living
,
The Gold Cell
,
The Father
,
The Wellspring
,
Blood, Tin, Straw
, and
The Unswept Room
...
From Satan Says (1980)...
From The Dead and the Living (1984)...
From The Gold Cell (1987)...
From The Father (1992)...
From The Wellspring (1996)...
From Blood, Tin, Straw (1999)...
From The Unswept Room (2002)...
From Satan Says (1980)...
In the sunless wooden room at noon
the mother had a talk with her daughter.
The rudeness could not go on, the meanness
to her little brother, the selfishness.
The eight-year-old sat on the bed
in the corner of the room, her irises distilled as
the last drops of something, her firm
face melting, reddening,
silver flashes in her eyes like distant
bodies of water glimpsed through woods.
She took it and took it and broke, crying out
I hate being a person! diving
into the mother
as if
into
a deep pond - and she cannot swim,
the child cannot swim.- The Talk, pg. 10
From The Dead and the Living (1984)...
When I was a connoisseuse of slugs
I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the
naked jelly of those greenish creatures,
translucent strangers glistening along
the stones, slowly, their gelatinous bodies
at my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel
to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,
but I was not interested in that. What I liked
was the draw aside the ivy, breathe
the odor of the wall, and stand there in silence
until the slug forgot I was there
and sent its antennae up out of its
head, the glimmering umber horns
rising like telescopes, until finally the
sensitive knobs would pop out the ends,
unerring and intimate. Years later,
when I first saw a naked man,
I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
mystery reenacted, the slow
elegant being coming out of hiding and
gleaming in the powdery air, eager and so
trusting you could weep.- The Connoisseuse of Slugs, pg. 22
From The Gold Cell (1987)...
It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the centre of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dimness and the heat - and at night,
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.- The Pope's Penis, pg. 42
From The Father (1992)...
The doctor said to my father, "You asked me
to tell you when nothing more could be done.
That's what I'm telling you now." My father
sat quite still, as he always did,
especially not moving his eyes. I had thought
he would rave if he understood he would die,
wave his arms and cry out. He sat up,
thin, and clean, in his clean gown,
like a holy man. The doctor said,
"There are things we can do which might give you time,
bu we cannot cure you." My father said,
"Thank you." And he sat, motionless, alone,
with the dignity of a foreign leader.
I sat beside him. This was my father.
He had known he was mortal. I had feared they would have to
tie him down. I had not remembered
he had always held still and kept quiet to bear things,
the liquor a way to keep still. I had not
known him. My father had dignity. At the
end of his life his life began
to wake in me.- His Stillness, pg. 61
From The Wellspring (1996)...
When the Dean said we could not cross campus
until the students gave up the buildings,
we lay down in the street,
we said the cops will enter this gate
over us. Lying back on the cobbles,
I saw the buildings of New York City
from dirt level, they soared up
and stopped, chopped off - above them, the sky,
the night air, over the island.
The mounted police moved, near us,
while we sang, and then I began to count,
12, 13, 14, 15
I counted again, 15, 16, one
mouth since the day on that deserted beach,
17, 18, my mouth fell open,
my hair on the street,
if my period did not come tonight
I was pregnant. I could see the ole of a cop's
shoe, the gelding's belly, its genitals -
if they took me to Women's Detention and did
the exam on me, the speculum,
the fingers - I gazed into the horse's tail
like a comet-train. I'd been thinking I might
get arrested, I had been half wanting
to give myself away. On the tar -
one brain in my head, another
in the making, near the base of my tail -
I looked at the steel arc of the horse's
show, the curve of its belly, the cop's
nightstick, the buildings steaming up
away from the earth, I knew I should get up
and leave, but I lay there looking at the space
above us, until it turned deep blue and then
ashy, colorless, Give me this one
night, colourless, and I'll give this child
the rest of my life, the horses' heads,
this time, drooping, dipping, until
they slept in a circle around my body and my daughter.- May 1968, pg. 91
From Blood, Tin, Straw (1999)...
The earth is a homeless person. Or
the earth's home is the atmosphere.
Or the atmosphere is the earth's clothing,
layers of it, the earth wears all of it,
the earth is a homeless person.
Or the atmosphere is the earth's cocoon,
which it spun itself, the earth is a larvum.
Or the atmosphere is the earth's skin -
earth, and atmosphere, one
homeless one. Or its orbit is the earth's
home, or the path of the orbit just
a path, the earth a homeless person.
Or the gutter of the earth's orbit is a circle
of hell, the circle of the homeless. But the earth
has a place, around the fire, the hearth
of our star, the earth is at home, the earth
is home to the homeless. For food, and warmth,
and shelter, and health, they have earth and fire
and air and water, for home they have
the elements they are made of, as if
each homeless one were an earth, made
of milk and grain, like Ceres, and one
could eat oneself - as if the human
were a god, who could eat the earth, a god
of homelessness.- What Is the Earth?, pg. 120
From The Unswept Room (2002)...
It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars and
half-cars strewn, it was still, and bright,
a woman was lying on the highway, on her back,
with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders
so the back of her head touched her spine
between her shoulder-blades, her clothes
mostly accidented off, and her
leg gone, a long bone
sticking out of the stub of her thigh -
this was her abandoned matter,
my mother grabbed my head and turned it and
clamped it into her chest, between
her breasts. My father was driving - not sober
but not in this accident, we'd approached it out of
neutral twilight, broken glass
on wet black macadam, like an underlying
midnight abristle with stars. This was
the world - maybe the only one.
The dead woman was not the person
my father had recently almost run over,
who had suddenly leapt away from our family
care jerking back from death,
she was not I, she was not my mother,
but maybe she was a model of the mortal,
the elements ranged around her on the tar -
glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family.- Still Life in Landscape, pg. 155
October 11, 2020
Strike Sparks, as with any anthology spanning decades, contains endless themes. The poems, having lives of their own, pull in wildly different directions. So let me just share one interpretation.
What I love most about this collection is how it's both visceral and ethereal at the same time. I never thought this could be possible. To me, creating work of an abstract or transcendent nature meant moving away from the gory details of everyday life. Ethereal was the feeling you got from a Mark Rothko painting, a Steve Reich piece, or an existentialist essay by Camus: although it obviously came from a visceral place, it only portrayed the bare minimum, the rarefied essence of a certain state of mind. Ethereal was the breakdown of meaning, not a product of it. It was a way of escaping what it means to be human.
But then we have Sharon Olds, with her gift of synesthesia and some sort of alchemy, penning visceral poetry you can still lose yourself to, such as this one about sex:
"Today we lay in our
small bedroom, dark gold with
reflected snow, and while the flakes
climbed
delicately down the sky,
you came into me, pressing aside
the curtain, revealing the small room,
dark gold with reflected snow [...]"
(from Infinite Bliss)
Or about using a diaphragm:
"When I think of being eighteen,
that’s what I see, that brimmed disc
floating through the air and descending, I
see myself
kneeling and reaching, reaching for my
own life."
(from Adolescence)
Or about giving birth:
"and it shines, it glistens with the thick
liquid on it.
That’s the moment, while it’s sliding, the
limbs
compressed close to the body, the arms
bent like a crab’s cloud-muscle legs, the thighs
packed plums in heavy syrup, the
legs folded like the wings of a chicken—
that is the center of life"
(from The Moment The Two Worlds Meet)
Or her father's cancer:
"The tumor is growing fast in his throat these days,
and as it grows it sends out pus
like the sun sending out flares, those
pouring
tongues."
(from The Glass)
Or death:
"When I’d picture my death, I would be
lying on my back,
and my spirit would rise to my belly-skin
and out
like a sheet of wax paper the shape of a
girl, furl
over from supine to prone and like the
djinn’s
carpet begin to fly, low,
over our planet [...]"
(from Heaven To Be)
These poems are transcendent and painfully human at the same time.
Many artists try to achieve this but fall short. Think of Bataille's bizarre Story of the Eye and its obsession with balls and sexual fluids. Or Yves Klein's Anthropometries, whose abstract blue forms are actually incidental to the actual performance: nude models dipping their bodies in blue ink and imprinting themselves on canvas, while a fully clothed, aristocratic audience watched from a distance. Or even a sci-fi comedy show like Rick & Morty with its sentient farts and chronically burping protagonist, for that matter. Each of these works invites us to escape from the world by focusing even more on the visceral, the disgusting and the dirty, as if the absurdity of creating worlds full of only dirty things is in itself enough to make them surreal. But this rarely produces the desired effect -- it's more likely to leave you confused, if not scarred with overly stark portrayals of the grotesque. If anything, you end up even more convinced that if farts and bodily excrements have artistic value, this is to be found in the feelings of disgust they evoke.
Still, works like these do also point towards an unspoken rule: any piece of art that tries to transcend this world must give a nod to the grotesque. Why is that? I tend to agree with David Graeber's thoughts on the matter, who suggests that trying to transcend this world is also a way of putting yourself above it. It's why upper-class etiquette can be so measured and graceful: to elevate yourself above others, you have to act like you yourself are an abstraction. It's why social hierarchies are based on a principle of avoidance, the sort of removal from the commons that’s so important in creating the image of divine kings.
If we accept this, then it's easy to see why some surrealists are paradoxically concerned with the grotesque. Without it, their art would not be credible outside avant-garde circles. Without it, their art would no longer be subversive -- it would merely reify the hierarchies it seeks to subvert, and this is indeed what often ends up happening.
With Olds, on the other hand, it's almost as if there's no distinction between the disgusting and the divine to begin with. This is why she can talk about her newborn as a "glistening verb" (from The Language of the Brag) or the pope's phallus as a "ghostly fish" (from the aptly named The Pope's Penis), without having the reader wince or recoil. It's also why she succeeds where others have failed: her poems strike a continuity between our world and others, because she sees that ultimately they share the same substance.
The last poem in Strike Sparks reads like an ingredient list for whipping up such worlds:
"Broken bay leaf. Olive pit.
Crab leg. Claw. Crayfish armor.
[...]
Chicken foot.
Wrasse skeleton. Hen head,
eye shut, beak open as if
singing in the dark.
[...]
O my characters,
my imagined, here are some fancies of
crumbs
from under love’s table."
(from The Unswept)
I like to think that Olds would want us to see her poems as, on some level, fun. This might sound incredibly irresponsible, as so many of her poems depict tragedies that will move and haunt the reader for a long time: a lover's untimely death, childhood abuse, a miscarriage, a painful divorce.
But Olds herself escaped from a puritanical upbringing and its needless severity:
"I remembered my parents’ frowns at any
whiff of savor outside the kitchen,
the Calvinist shudder, in that house, at
the sweet
grease of life."
(from Fish Oil)
So even if many of her poems cover tragic subjects, they also open up new ways of imagining this world in all its pain and splendor, of seeing sparks of magic in the everyday, of affirming life as ultimately worth living. To miss this sense of joy in them, I think, is to miss the point.
What I love most about this collection is how it's both visceral and ethereal at the same time. I never thought this could be possible. To me, creating work of an abstract or transcendent nature meant moving away from the gory details of everyday life. Ethereal was the feeling you got from a Mark Rothko painting, a Steve Reich piece, or an existentialist essay by Camus: although it obviously came from a visceral place, it only portrayed the bare minimum, the rarefied essence of a certain state of mind. Ethereal was the breakdown of meaning, not a product of it. It was a way of escaping what it means to be human.
But then we have Sharon Olds, with her gift of synesthesia and some sort of alchemy, penning visceral poetry you can still lose yourself to, such as this one about sex:
"Today we lay in our
small bedroom, dark gold with
reflected snow, and while the flakes
climbed
delicately down the sky,
you came into me, pressing aside
the curtain, revealing the small room,
dark gold with reflected snow [...]"
(from Infinite Bliss)
Or about using a diaphragm:
"When I think of being eighteen,
that’s what I see, that brimmed disc
floating through the air and descending, I
see myself
kneeling and reaching, reaching for my
own life."
(from Adolescence)
Or about giving birth:
"and it shines, it glistens with the thick
liquid on it.
That’s the moment, while it’s sliding, the
limbs
compressed close to the body, the arms
bent like a crab’s cloud-muscle legs, the thighs
packed plums in heavy syrup, the
legs folded like the wings of a chicken—
that is the center of life"
(from The Moment The Two Worlds Meet)
Or her father's cancer:
"The tumor is growing fast in his throat these days,
and as it grows it sends out pus
like the sun sending out flares, those
pouring
tongues."
(from The Glass)
Or death:
"When I’d picture my death, I would be
lying on my back,
and my spirit would rise to my belly-skin
and out
like a sheet of wax paper the shape of a
girl, furl
over from supine to prone and like the
djinn’s
carpet begin to fly, low,
over our planet [...]"
(from Heaven To Be)
These poems are transcendent and painfully human at the same time.
Many artists try to achieve this but fall short. Think of Bataille's bizarre Story of the Eye and its obsession with balls and sexual fluids. Or Yves Klein's Anthropometries, whose abstract blue forms are actually incidental to the actual performance: nude models dipping their bodies in blue ink and imprinting themselves on canvas, while a fully clothed, aristocratic audience watched from a distance. Or even a sci-fi comedy show like Rick & Morty with its sentient farts and chronically burping protagonist, for that matter. Each of these works invites us to escape from the world by focusing even more on the visceral, the disgusting and the dirty, as if the absurdity of creating worlds full of only dirty things is in itself enough to make them surreal. But this rarely produces the desired effect -- it's more likely to leave you confused, if not scarred with overly stark portrayals of the grotesque. If anything, you end up even more convinced that if farts and bodily excrements have artistic value, this is to be found in the feelings of disgust they evoke.
Still, works like these do also point towards an unspoken rule: any piece of art that tries to transcend this world must give a nod to the grotesque. Why is that? I tend to agree with David Graeber's thoughts on the matter, who suggests that trying to transcend this world is also a way of putting yourself above it. It's why upper-class etiquette can be so measured and graceful: to elevate yourself above others, you have to act like you yourself are an abstraction. It's why social hierarchies are based on a principle of avoidance, the sort of removal from the commons that’s so important in creating the image of divine kings.
If we accept this, then it's easy to see why some surrealists are paradoxically concerned with the grotesque. Without it, their art would not be credible outside avant-garde circles. Without it, their art would no longer be subversive -- it would merely reify the hierarchies it seeks to subvert, and this is indeed what often ends up happening.
With Olds, on the other hand, it's almost as if there's no distinction between the disgusting and the divine to begin with. This is why she can talk about her newborn as a "glistening verb" (from The Language of the Brag) or the pope's phallus as a "ghostly fish" (from the aptly named The Pope's Penis), without having the reader wince or recoil. It's also why she succeeds where others have failed: her poems strike a continuity between our world and others, because she sees that ultimately they share the same substance.
The last poem in Strike Sparks reads like an ingredient list for whipping up such worlds:
"Broken bay leaf. Olive pit.
Crab leg. Claw. Crayfish armor.
[...]
Chicken foot.
Wrasse skeleton. Hen head,
eye shut, beak open as if
singing in the dark.
[...]
O my characters,
my imagined, here are some fancies of
crumbs
from under love’s table."
(from The Unswept)
I like to think that Olds would want us to see her poems as, on some level, fun. This might sound incredibly irresponsible, as so many of her poems depict tragedies that will move and haunt the reader for a long time: a lover's untimely death, childhood abuse, a miscarriage, a painful divorce.
But Olds herself escaped from a puritanical upbringing and its needless severity:
"I remembered my parents’ frowns at any
whiff of savor outside the kitchen,
the Calvinist shudder, in that house, at
the sweet
grease of life."
(from Fish Oil)
So even if many of her poems cover tragic subjects, they also open up new ways of imagining this world in all its pain and splendor, of seeing sparks of magic in the everyday, of affirming life as ultimately worth living. To miss this sense of joy in them, I think, is to miss the point.
April 23, 2008
so many...
The Clasp
by Sharon Olds
She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,
we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,
I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his
face, again, and when I had her wrist
in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple
of seconds, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,
the expression, into her, of my anger,
"Never, never, again," the righteous
chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very
fast-grab, crush, crush,
crush, release-and at the first extra
force, she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me-yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeply open eyes took me
in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment
she learned me. This was her mother, one of the
two whom she most loved, the two
who loved her most, near the source of love
was this.
The Clasp
by Sharon Olds
She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,
we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,
I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his
face, again, and when I had her wrist
in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple
of seconds, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,
the expression, into her, of my anger,
"Never, never, again," the righteous
chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very
fast-grab, crush, crush,
crush, release-and at the first extra
force, she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me-yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeply open eyes took me
in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment
she learned me. This was her mother, one of the
two whom she most loved, the two
who loved her most, near the source of love
was this.
March 30, 2008
There is so much to learn from the poetry of Sharon Olds, such as the courage of storytelling, the neccesity and power of imagery, the obsessions that carry us, the usage of line, and the physical shape of the poem on the page. It's been very useful to read Olds' poems on themes such as love, sex, marriage, parenthood, childhood, and death. Her obsessions are taken to the page with love and compassion, and her various elegies are some of the most powerful and beautiful of contemporary poetry. Though I recommend each of her books, I would prioritize reading either "The Gold Cell", "The Father", or her highly praised second book, "The Dead and the Living".
September 26, 2015
I'm thinking of all the different wonderful things I got out of this. Her poems on being a parent of young children were striking & memorable and something I could relate to on several levels. Her latest poems here are quite complex and would benefit, I imagine, from a closer reading. I worked through these all at quite fast pace.
January 23, 2025
Išpažintinė poezija, tuo pat metu santūri ir svaigiai drąsi (keistas derinys). Kiekvienas eilėraštis - lyg intymus pasakojimas.
Stipriausi tekstai - tie, kuriuose vienu ar kitu būdu dalyvauja tėvas, kartais tik per užuominą, bet ta užuomina lyg mina, rodos, vos pajudinsi, ir sprogs. Nustebino, kiek daug šioje poezijoje sekso, kartais net pornografiškų pasažų. Veikia, nes seksualinė patirtis ir rašymas apie ją yra būdas išsilaisvinti iš siaubingos vaikystės, vienatvės, smurto patirties. Bandžiau įsivaizduoti, kaip skambėtų, jei taip rašytų lietuvių poetė, ypač vyresnio amžiaus, ar būtų žiauriai cringe? :D
Įspūdinga stebėti autorės evoliuciją bėgant metams - eilėraščių forma nekinta (visada tie patys teksto „šmotai“), bet patirtys gilėja, jos permąstomos iš naujo, pamatomos vis kitaip. Į galą pradėjo šiek tiek dusinti, buvo nejauku skaityti eilėraščius, kur cituojami ištisi pokalbiai su artimaisiais, atstūmė noras absoliučiai susilieti su vyru (nors bendrame kontekste aišku, kodėl).
Nors rinktinėje yra monotonijos, radau didelį pluoštą ryškių, galingų eilėraščių. Dabar žinosiu, kad galima ir taip.
Stipriausi tekstai - tie, kuriuose vienu ar kitu būdu dalyvauja tėvas, kartais tik per užuominą, bet ta užuomina lyg mina, rodos, vos pajudinsi, ir sprogs. Nustebino, kiek daug šioje poezijoje sekso, kartais net pornografiškų pasažų. Veikia, nes seksualinė patirtis ir rašymas apie ją yra būdas išsilaisvinti iš siaubingos vaikystės, vienatvės, smurto patirties. Bandžiau įsivaizduoti, kaip skambėtų, jei taip rašytų lietuvių poetė, ypač vyresnio amžiaus, ar būtų žiauriai cringe? :D
Įspūdinga stebėti autorės evoliuciją bėgant metams - eilėraščių forma nekinta (visada tie patys teksto „šmotai“), bet patirtys gilėja, jos permąstomos iš naujo, pamatomos vis kitaip. Į galą pradėjo šiek tiek dusinti, buvo nejauku skaityti eilėraščius, kur cituojami ištisi pokalbiai su artimaisiais, atstūmė noras absoliučiai susilieti su vyru (nors bendrame kontekste aišku, kodėl).
Nors rinktinėje yra monotonijos, radau didelį pluoštą ryškių, galingų eilėraščių. Dabar žinosiu, kad galima ir taip.
March 8, 2025
When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
bought a ticket, ten minutes later
they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled […]
I
ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he’d told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. […]
and then I took a deep breath, I said
Goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
strong legs, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose.
Like the one who is not
too rich, I turned sideways and
slipped through the needle’s eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father.
bought a ticket, ten minutes later
they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled […]
I
ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he’d told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. […]
and then I took a deep breath, I said
Goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
strong legs, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose.
Like the one who is not
too rich, I turned sideways and
slipped through the needle’s eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father.
April 14, 2022
There were some standouts, and also many poems that felt like Olds just needed to process and get the words and feelings out. This was my first collection of hers to read. Her style is very autobiographical. She talks about childhood, her parents, her children, and a WHOLE lot about sex with her husband. She excels at bringing beauty and playful language out of everyday experiences. I remember one phrase, “your daily hand.”
January 10, 2022
This definitely made me want to read each of Sharon Olds’s collections on their own—particularly the Unswept room. This collection is very well-curated and I recommend it for anyone trying to really dive into Olds’s work, her voice, and her superb writing on love, family, the body, and finding the self in all of those things.
April 1, 2023
I first became aware of Sharon Olds in graduate school for my masters. She came to read at tge university. You can’t be a coward and read her work. She absolutely paints a picture of what it’s like to be a woman. I read this book in one sitting. I can’t tell you how many times I cried.
This is my April book challenge .
This is my April book challenge .
November 1, 2016
Beautiful compilation of Olds' work. She is a master of contemporary english. I love her sense of identity and fleeting observations.
For some reason, I was particularly moved by the selections from The Father, even though I couldn't personally relate...they were just lovely for what they were.
For some reason, I was particularly moved by the selections from The Father, even though I couldn't personally relate...they were just lovely for what they were.
October 7, 2017
A collection of Olds' poems that span a little over 20 years. Many favorites are here, like "I Go Back to May 1937", and it's nice to see all of these all together, where one can see the progression of a life so seamlessly.
December 8, 2017
This was a revelation for me. It was so good to read poems with a story, a narrative element, that were first and foremost poetry. This is what I've been working toward and fighting against in my own work. This is what I meant to be doing. I only hope I can succeed as well as Sharon Olds has.
December 12, 2020
My copy of this book is filled with underlines and scribbles. Sharon Olds truly gives justice to the drama, erotics, and complications of life, but maintains careful control all the while. One has a sense of absolution after reading. <3
February 24, 2021
La poesía de Sharon Olds es una experiencia telúrica de las pasiones familiares, de la omnipresente presencia del padre y la débil expresión de la madre. Además de una dolorosa visión de la sexualidad femenina.
July 31, 2022
I rarely read entire poetry anthologies, but enjoyed this one by Sharon Olds. Her poems of motherhood, her own childhood, and her father’s death were wonderful examples of what it is to write so specifically and personally that a poet/author is actually describing a universal experience.
August 2, 2018
each poem became my favorite as i read it
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