THE DEAD & THE LIVING

by Sharon Olds

Poems deal with death, childhood, marriage, love, parenthood, and family relationships

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, The United States Of America, Literature, Contemporary, Womens, American

80 pages, Hardcover

First published February 12, 1984

About the author

Born 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.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

HAPPY POETRY MONTH!

april is national poetry month,
so here come thirty floats!
the cynics here will call this plan
a shameless grab for votes.
and maybe there’s some truth to that—
i do love validation,
but charitably consider it
a rhyme-y celebration.
i don’t intend to flood your feed—
i’ll just post one a day.
endure four weeks of reruns
and then it will be may!

**************************

if vaginas could write poems, these are the poems they would write: embracing maternal vaginas, devouring vagina dentatas, horny vaginas, nature's flowering vaginas...they're all here in their layered, moist humidity.

come to my blog!

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw that others were reading this review, so I pulled out this book at dawn and reread it and edited/ added some things in my review. Like this poem:

Possessed (for my parents)

I have never left.
Your bodies are before me
at all times, in the dark I see
the stars of your teeth in their fixed patterns
wheeling over my bed, and the darkness
is your hair, the fragrance of your two heads
over my crib, your body-hairs
which I count as God counts the feathers of the sparrows,
one by one. And I never leave your sight,
I can look in the eyes of any stranger and
find you there, in the rich swimming
bottom-of-the-barrel brown, or in the
blue that reflects from the knife’s blade,
and I smell you always, the dead cigars and
Chanel in the mink, and I can hear you coming,
the slow stopped bear tread and the
quick fox, her nails on the ice,
and I dream the inner parts of your bodies, the
coils of your bowels like smoke, your hearts
opening like jaws, drops from your glands
clinging to my walls like pearls in the night.
You think I left—I was the child
who got away, thousands of miles,
but not a day goes past that I am not
turning someone into you.
Never having had you, I cannot let you go, I
turn now, in the fear of this moment,
into your soft stained paw
resting on her breast, into your breast trying to
creep away from under his palm—
your gooseflesh like the shells of a thousand tiny snails,
your palm like a streambed gone dry in summer.

This is a great volume of poetry. Why is it I, having begun to read her thirty years ago and more, never read this book, the most and most highly reviewed one on Goodreads? Not sure. I may have picked it up and saw poems about her kids and I had no kids, maybe thought the edge would come off her Satan Says voice and become sentimental because of that, and of course I would have reason to believe it would, because we do, I do, other poets do, but she does not. The same threatening, sinister, unpredictable, sometimes hostile world remains, but now threatens her children as it did her. Once again we see the body is so central in Olds: Vibrant, buoyant, youthful bodies and aging, decaying and dying, decomposing bodies; the sexual body certainly, full of a sex that beckons, threatens, this powerful force that is always there.

How are these poems alike and different than her last book, about her divorce, Stag's Leap? The unstintingly look at the self, and family, in the older Olds, in Stag's Leap, is there from the beginning, the rage, the passion, the autobiographical narrative drive, the "confessional" sharing of painful details from her life, but in this book, maybe her best from a "literary" perspective, she is more lyrical, more open to dramatic metaphor. Language, powerful language, is more central here than in the later work.

In Stag's Leap the language is a bit more stripped down, more narrative, less patient with the poetic/literary separation between experience and life. The language in The Dead and the Living is often gorgeous, and one can see how three great poets like June Jordan, Charles Simic, and David Wagoner (amazing committee!) might have chosen it for the 1983 Lamont Prize in Poetry (for second books). My favorites are NOT the ones about children, though, in spite of my now having my own brood; they are, as always, the poems about her sisters and brothers and grandparents and especially the deliciously vicious ones of her mother and father, the poems of not blind but completely eyes-open rage at the emotional and physical and sexual abuse of her childhood, where I voyeuristically peer around the corners of pages into the very car wrecks of her past.

I like the few poems here about photographs, the (always!) unsentimental portraits and elegies for the dead that are not her own, but the edge is off when talking about Marilyn Monroe, they have not hurt her (though somehow even that poem is about Olds and kinds of objectification and abuse in an amazing way) as her family has done to her. I make it seem like here is no joy in these poems but there is on almost every page, and there's wit and humor, too, and passionate love and passionate sex and passionate language, exulting in that. I think I am going to reread everything I have read from her and write, write, write, my own life. We all should!

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this collection but I bought this book long ago because of this poem:

The Elder Sister
by Sharon Olds

When I look at my elder sister now
I think how she had to go first, down through the
birth canal, to force her way
head-first through the tiny channel,
the pressure of Mother’s muscles on her brain,
the tight walls scraping her skin.
Her face is still narrow from it, the long
hollow cheeks of a crusader on a tomb,
and her inky eyes have the look of someone who has
been in prison a long time and
knows they can send her back. I look at her
body and think how her breasts were the first to
rise, slowly, like swans on a pond.
By the time mine came along, they were just
two more birds in the flock, and when the hair
rose on the white mound of her flesh, like
threads of water out of the ground, it was the
first time, but when mine came
they knew about it. I used to think
only in terms of her harshness, sitting and
pissing on me in bed, but now I
see I had her before me always
like a shield. I look at her wrinkles, her clenched
jaws, her frown-lines—I see they are
the dents in my shield, the blows that did not reach me.
She protected me, not as a mother
protects a child, with love, but as a
hostage protects the one who makes her
escape as I made my escape, with my sister’s
body held in front of me.

[molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know how I feel about Sharon Olds anymore, but I do know that when eleven-year-old-Me found this book in my aunt's spare bedroom, it blew my world apart. I remember reading all night, looking up when I finished to see that the sun was rising. No one had bothered to inform me that poems could be not only unrhymed but also irreverent, visceral, carnal, funny, personal, radical, subversive –– in short, a laundry list of the tenets of my present-day poetics.

When asked why I write, my answer will always somehow invoke "The Dead and the Living." Other poets have since meant more to me, but it was Olds who opened the door to let them in.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

If (so called) Confessional Poetry didn’t exist then it would have had to be invented, if only by Time-Warner.

Alas it the irruption of generational trauma into public discourse which allowed the tendency to find form in Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton: an incest of sorts which gave us Sharon Olds or at least a familiar path to understanding such. Olds in turn gives us perverse lessons in geography and fairy tales of fated/inherited rape culture. We see marriage as martyrdom. I was often horrified but remained steadily in awe of the displayed prowess.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you find yourself left cold by poetry, you haven't read Olds.

[Kym]

Here is the poem that made me take notice of Sharon Olds:

"I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it."

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the care of a lesser talented poet, Sharon Olds’s candor and daring could come off all wrong. Whether she tackles her father’s drunkenness or her mother’s parental inadequacies, or whether she discusses her own sexual awakening or the startling observations of own her children, Olds’s ability to examine the dysfunction of family and the ecstasy of love succeeds precisely because she can locate both the dismaying and tender humanness associated with the most private of subjects. The Dead and the Living is one of those landmark pieces of American literature. It is a work that elevated Sharon Olds to a status as one of America’s preeminent artists. Thirty years after its publication, this stunning volume of poems still reverberates due to its brilliant, unyielding openness.

[Austin Butler · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the only collection of poetry that I can remember returning.

Most of these poems are just BAD. They read like any number of generic, half-assed poetry you would find in a bad MFA program. There are poetic devices in here that made me shelf the book upon reading them. I would cite some if I had the book. They are so immediately obvious and unoriginal, maybe even cliché, that I would shake my head and mutter, in disbelief. It was like watching a musician you respect play horribly or your favorite sports team running a juvenile play that costs them the game.

To the book's credit, there were a few good poems, maybe even great poems – poems that I wrote all over and said the lines out loud again, poems that made me want to make poems. But not even those poems redeemed this book.

I wanted to like The Dead and the Living. I have been a Sharon Olds fan since Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux recommended The Gold Cell. The night I finished The Gold Cell I went to the book store and bought Satan Says, which I thought was great.

There seems to be a shared sentiment among Olds fans towards her new poetry, that it's just disappointing. Maybe The Dead and the Living is representative of the direction Olds' poetry is going. If so, I'm glad she wrote The Gold Cell and Satan Says. I look forward to reading The Father.

[Erika · Rating 2 out of 5]

part one: confessional quality. part two: voyeuristic (and it's about her own children...reminds me in a way of sally mann's photos of her kids). i am not a parent but i think if i were, the last thing i would be compelled to describe would be my child's penis, vagina, or ass cheeks. maybe she writes it from a place of love but the way she writes about her parents in part one it seems as though there is a very dark history of cruelty or abuse and that may have manifested in how she relates to her own offspring. it's only speculation. honestly it is difficult for me to see any other reason than her --excuse the bluntness but-- fuckedupness to violate her own children by exposing their bodies so descriptively, verging on sickly, through the written word. we all can write and invoke creative license but my inclination is to say no to taking it to this level of description. in how she writes of her daughter growing ovaries well idk someone shouldve told her "tough luck" it's her turn now--i guess she didnt get the memo that having children ought to be a selfless act and the growth of your young into healthy individuals ought not to evoke jealousy or bitterness. like olds says herself, she was bred to "put herself first"--and i honestly hurt for her and her loved ones affected by this. her writing is solid, imaginitive, heavy, loaded, intense, consistently macabre in tone and theme. i knew picking this up that it wouldnt be the most uplifting poetry collection i'd read...i vaguely remember reading The Unswept Room years ago and being simultaneously depressed and intrigued. But i wouldnt grant her work here the accolades she has received--i feel it is the work of art to inspire, uplift, create more curiosity than cringe-factor or desire to run and hide--that's me. dark lady. dark thoughts. won't be picking this up again any time soon but, the poems i did enjoy are:

the elder sister
poem to my first lover
new mother
the line
rite of passage
the missing boy


i certainly hope that, in writing this book, olds was liberated from demons as numerous as she writes about here--we each deal with our problems differently--and personally i understand the need to skip the therapist and go for the camera or the keyboard (or pen or typewriter). i hope she stops seeing magnetism in everything sad or painful she alludes to when describing her precious childrens' heads of hair as they sleep, since dealing with everything, the need for its echo of her own pain will fade. or, not. maybe her calling in art is to convey pain, darkness, suffering. theres so much of that in the world, past and present--i cant foresee myself seeking it out in poetic form without serious reservation in the future.

[Cathy Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharon Olds is like your sweet next-door neighbor, the one who brings you plum jelly every year and collects your mail while you're away, and then one day reveals over coffee that her sister used to squat over her in bed and pee in her face.

What a collection! All of it is memorable, from the first harrowing poems about world politics through the last sweet (though probably embarrassing) ones about her children's blooming sexuality. I especially enjoyed the times when she'd run a series of poems along a theme, even using the same subject and the same occurrences, but changing the delivery in subtle ways. I never would have guessed saying the same thing twice could seem so original!

[Tonya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sharon Olds' poems are often so intimate, so jarring that it hurts to read them. Many feel like an absolute invasion of her most private life, revelations that I could not bring myself to say even to those closest to me. A stunning collection.

[Katie Marquette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seems to fall into sensationalism very easily... Her best work is probably her photo poems. When she becomes too personal the poems suffer. Some of the pieces were, though, incredibly moving.

[Julie Grace Immink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Which direction do we face to talk to the dead?

[Javier Calderón · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Algunas veces mi hija me mira con un
oscuro gesto de ámbar, como mi padre
a punto de desmayarse de indignación, y recuerdo
que ella nació bajo el signo de Saturno,
el padre que devoró a sus hijos. A veces
su oscura y muda nuca
me recuerda a él inconsciente en el sofá
cada noche, con la cara vuelta.
Algunas veces le oigo hablar con su hermano
con esa frialdad que en él pasaba por madurez,
esa rabia endurecida por la voluntad, y cuando ella se enfurece
en su habitación, y da un portazo,
puedo ver su espalda, vacía y vasta,
cuando él se desvanecía para escapar de nosotros,
y se tumbaba mientras el bourbon convertía su cerebro
en carbón. A veces veo ese carbón
ígneo en los ojos de mi hija. Al hablar con ella,
intentando persuadirla hacia lo humano, su carita
limpia se ladea como si no pudiera
oírme, como si estuviera atenta
a la sangre de su propio oído, en vez de a mí,
a la voz de su abuelo.”

(«El signo de Saturno»)

Este libro me ha impresionado. La importancia de este hecho radica en que las cosas difícilmente me impresionan (la importancia para mí, claro, a vosotres os da igual). Sharon Olds estetiza con palabras la masacre, la crueldad, lo escatológico, las asociaciones heréticas en la temática “filio-paternal”, por un lado, y materno-filial, por el otro. Pero no es una estetización cuyo fin sea el de cristalizar o justificar en la “belleza poética” estos asuntos. Al contrario, esa elevación evidencia las fracturas y yo solo puedo hacerme miles de preguntas, evidenciarme a mí mismo, dudar del bello mundo.

[Radha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh, didn’t care for it. Nothing memorable. I specially didn’t like the last sections about men and the one about children. Nothing spectacular. Just strings of words repeating similar subjects over and over again.

The elder sister was one of the only remarkable out of them all.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply brilliant and brave poetry, filled with aching, unsparing details evoked in glimmering images. We should all have the courage and honesty to examine our lives in this way.

[Claudia Pastor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este es el segundo libro que leo de Sharon Olds y si no le pongo 5 estrellas es porque El padre me pareció incomparable. Sin embargo, no duden de que en Los muertos y los vivos se encontrarán con poemas increíbles.

Este libro se divide en dos partes: Poemas para los muertos (Públicos y Personales) y Poemas para los vivos (La familia, Los hombres y Los niños). La mayoría de poemas que encontramos en estas páginas son sobre todo del espacio íntimo de la voz poética (el esposo, los hijos, el infaltable padre, personaje potente en la literatura de la autora), lo cual vuelve a varios brutales, más brutales de lo que uno podría pensar. Sin embargo, incluso los poemas de los muertos públicos están cargados de una pena universal que nos acerca a esos cuerpos inertes que nos hacen sufrir tanto como un cuerpo amado.

Sharon Olds es una escritora única y su poesía ha marcado un antes y un después en mi vida como lectora. Nadie me ha oprimido el pecho como ella. Se las recomiendo.

[Manuel Gil · Rating 5 out of 5]

"[10/2 8:23] Anto: me está dando pena acabarlo :(
[10/2 8:23] Anto: qué más puedes pedir a un libro pues poco más"

E eu engado: ter ganas de comprar todos os libros da autora.

Sen palabras.

[Liván · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente, íntimo, desgarrador, bello, meditativo... lo que la poesía puede ser y más. Y menos, también, en la sencillez de lo cotidiano y repetido que Sharon Olds sabe hilar de manera magistral. No es sólo un libro de poemas punzantes, también una colección tan bien construida y riquísima de leer por el ritmo que mantiene en todas sus partes.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I particularly like the way Sharon Olds writes about men. In fact, there's a section in this book called "The Men." Yup, it's full of poems about dudes. The first one, "Connoisseuse of Slugs," is maybe my favorite in the whole book. Basically, she compares the first erection she ever saw to the way a slug's antennae slowly pop out of its head. It's simple and funny and endearing, and it shows the innocence and gentleness of men and sex.

There's another really powerful poem in this section, "Poem to My Husband from My Father's Daughter," that does something even more complicated. The speaker assumes the identity of her father as she and her husband have sex, and speaks to her husband from this persona. It would be easy to write such a poem as a fuck-you (literally) to the father or a challenge to the husband's masculinity, but again, the overall tone of the poem is celebratory. It ends, "as you enter / ecstasy, the hairs lifting / all over your body, I have never seen a / happier man." It doesn't feel like it's being written at either man's expense.

Some people dismiss Sharon Olds as a shock-value writer. I do find her work shocking, which I quite enjoy, but I don't find that the poems' value ends with the shock. She's got aftershock value, too. I am always impressed by her tenderness and her devotion to beauty. This was a very good book.

[Patricia Iniesto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinario. Es el primer libro que leo de esta autora y me ha impactado mucho. Sharon Olds es capaz de escribir sobre lo más cotidiano con unas imágenes tan potentes que de calan hasta los huesos. El poemario está dividido en dos bloques, "Poemas para los muertos" y "Poemas para los vivos", y cada uno de ellos, a su vez se compone de varios apartados. Si los "Poemas para los muertos" se centran en disturbios sociales, conflictos bélicos y episodios familiares y personales pasados, los "Poemas para los vivos" exponen el presente, lo dibujan como quien describe una fotografía y forman las grietas que dejan entrever el futuro.
Son muchos los poemas que me han dejado temblando, este ha sido uno de ellos:

35/10

Mientras cepillo el pelo oscuro y
sedoso de mi hija ante el espejo
veo el canoso resplandor de mi cabeza,
la sirvienta llena de canas que está detrás. ¿Por qué será
que justo cuando comenzamos a marcharnos
ellos llegan, las dobleces del cuello
haciéndose evidentes mientras que los delicados huesos de sus
caderas se afilan? Mientras mi piel muestra
sus marcas resecas, ella se abre como una flor
pequeña y pálida en la punta de un cactus;
cuando mis últimas oportunidades de concebir un hijo
se me escapan por el cuerpo, restos inútiles,
su bolsa llena de óvulos, redondos y
compactos como yemas de huevo duro, está a punto de
hacer saltar su broche. Le cepillo el pelo enredado
y fragante a la hora de acostarse. Es una vieja
historia -la más antigua que existe en la tierra-
la historia del testigo.

[Ashly Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have no experience with Olds at all and was a little unsure about this book just based on the title and cover, but I'm slowly working my way through my library's poetry collection and wanted to give the old gal a try.

I guess when I think about it, the content of this book makes sense, but I still found the sexualization bizarre and uncomfortable in the worst way. Like... The poems for the dead were really really good and set the collection up well, but ... I do not want to read about your six-year-old son's penis? I don't think I'm being a prude here...

Anyway. The first half was a lot stronger than the second half. The repeated imagery was not very welcome (i.e. children's genitalia and strange electra complex type transfiguration) and not very useful in my opinion. Basically, I became more and more disappointed as the collection wore on and I'm not sure I'd be super interested in reading more Olds based on this book alone.

[Patch · Rating 4 out of 5]

really liked this 🤎
Its interesting how she talks about genitals so much but in combination with the use of bodies and body parts as a symbolic language the effect is less sexual and more visceral. I'm not sure how I feel about poets who write heavily about their children, theres a sort of possessiveness in writing a poem about anyone. Which isnt inherently harmful but has the potential to be, especially with the preexisting hierarchical familial relationship. however I also get the sense Olds isn't speculating about her children and their futures as a form of control, but more as a form of acceptance of her lack of control and uncertainty.

[Austin]

It's really incredible, wonderful, precise work.
"Today I see it is there to be learned from you: / to love what I do not own."

[sacredheart · Rating 2 out of 5]

now i
sometimes sit on the porch, waiting,
trying to feel you there like the color of the
flowers in the dark.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feels too reliant on the confessional mode at times, but Olds always has a way in the end.

[actuallymynamesssantiago · Rating 2 out of 5]

No es lo mejor que leí de Olds. No tiene esa curiosidad o esa forma de ver que le es tan propia.

[federico garcía LOCA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grateful for the farewell poem, which found me right when I was looking for it, even though I didn’t know that’s what I was looking for

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

My God! Olds knows how to end a poem