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One Secret Thing
A powerful collection of poems about family and grief—by the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called "a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back down" ( San Francisco Chronicle ).
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 humor, 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 revisioning, 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.
The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his
first rotation in the emergency room.
On the ancient boarding-school radio,
in the attic hall, the announcer had given my
boyfriend’s name as one of two
brought to the hospital after the sunrise
service, the egg-hunt, the crash—one of them
critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the
stairwell banisters, at their lathing,
the necks and knobs like joints and bones,
the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had said
Which one of them died, and now the world was
an ant’s the huge crumb of each
second thrown, somehow, up onto
my back, and the young, tired voice
said my fresh love’s name.
from “Easter 1960”
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 humor, 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 revisioning, 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.
The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his
first rotation in the emergency room.
On the ancient boarding-school radio,
in the attic hall, the announcer had given my
boyfriend’s name as one of two
brought to the hospital after the sunrise
service, the egg-hunt, the crash—one of them
critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the
stairwell banisters, at their lathing,
the necks and knobs like joints and bones,
the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had said
Which one of them died, and now the world was
an ant’s the huge crumb of each
second thrown, somehow, up onto
my back, and the young, tired voice
said my fresh love’s name.
from “Easter 1960”
112 pages, Paperback
First published September 23, 2008
28 people are currently reading
517 people want to read
About the author
Sharon Olds
86 books765 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 69 reviews
April 9, 2018
Pretty raw.
Not sure if this was the right place to start with Olds' body of work, but I did find some standouts in the collection. The Cannery, 1942-1945 was so visceral, I could see the words. The Scare was one that I read several times and that stayed with me.
Not sure if this was the right place to start with Olds' body of work, but I did find some standouts in the collection. The Cannery, 1942-1945 was so visceral, I could see the words. The Scare was one that I read several times and that stayed with me.
January 1, 2009
Last night, Sharon Olds read from her new collection, One Secret Thing, at The Literary Center at the Margaret Mitchell House. It was a packed house, and I waited in line for an hour to get my copy signed. I also had the rare pleasure to observe a private reception where Olds talked to a dozen high school students about poetry. It was during this session that Olds read "I Go Back to May 1937," which, for me, is the equivalent of hearing Anne Sexton read "Her Kind." The students didn't get the gravity of the moment, but I was in awe to hear her read this classic poem. The public reading last night was exclusively poems from One Secret Thing until she asked that the camera filming the event be turned off so she could read the first draft of a new poem about race relations she had written that morning in her hotel room. Another rare pleasure.
As she began her reading, Olds said the new collection is "against war," but since this is Sharon Olds, war comes in many guises, including finding a sought-after peace with her dying mother. Indeed, the first section of the book is simply called "War" and Olds used photographs from World War II to arrive at these short, powerful pieces. However, in an ingenious twist, she stripped out any reference to the era so that the poems stand as a treatise against any kind of war. In the second section, "The Cannery," shifts to a familiar battleground -- her family life. Her mother takes center stage in this section and the abuse Olds' suffered at her hands in what she has described as a "Calvinist hellfire" home. She also had the balls to use an unflattering review from bitter William Logan as an epigraph to the poem "Calvinist Parents": Sometime during the Truman Administration, Sharon Olds's parents tied her to a chair, and she is still writing about it. Olds goes on to unleash 20 lines that are better than anything Logan has written, or will write, in his life.
There are a number of side-trips away from the main theme, which are quirky and full of humor in the midst of the war. One is "Self-Portrait, Rear View," which she performed on HBO's Def Poetry Jam and that you can watch at this link, and a lovely poem dedicated to Edmund White called "Sleeves," where she realizes that one of her childhood crushes was most likely gay.
Then the collection closes with the death of Olds' mother and these are heartbreaking poems. Olds said she fought the urge to title the collection The Mother, saying it would have been too neat a bookend to The Father. The poems are broken into two sections -- "Cassiopeia" (which is the cover image of the collection) and "One Secret Thing" -- and chronicle the discovery of her mother's brain tumor, the vigil at her deathbed and the scattering of her ashes at sea. While these poems are deeply personal, there is a universality about them that will cut close to home for anyone who has lost a parent. One Secret Thing effectively brings to a close a story Olds has been telling us in her last eight collections. There is a sense of release and hard-won peace by this brilliant collection's end. I drew a heavy sigh as I read the last poem, "Nereid Elegy," about Olds and her family putting her mother's ashes into the water along with flowers plucked from her garden. There is finally closure for Olds and this collection allows us to share it with her. What a gift.
As she began her reading, Olds said the new collection is "against war," but since this is Sharon Olds, war comes in many guises, including finding a sought-after peace with her dying mother. Indeed, the first section of the book is simply called "War" and Olds used photographs from World War II to arrive at these short, powerful pieces. However, in an ingenious twist, she stripped out any reference to the era so that the poems stand as a treatise against any kind of war. In the second section, "The Cannery," shifts to a familiar battleground -- her family life. Her mother takes center stage in this section and the abuse Olds' suffered at her hands in what she has described as a "Calvinist hellfire" home. She also had the balls to use an unflattering review from bitter William Logan as an epigraph to the poem "Calvinist Parents": Sometime during the Truman Administration, Sharon Olds's parents tied her to a chair, and she is still writing about it. Olds goes on to unleash 20 lines that are better than anything Logan has written, or will write, in his life.
There are a number of side-trips away from the main theme, which are quirky and full of humor in the midst of the war. One is "Self-Portrait, Rear View," which she performed on HBO's Def Poetry Jam and that you can watch at this link, and a lovely poem dedicated to Edmund White called "Sleeves," where she realizes that one of her childhood crushes was most likely gay.
Then the collection closes with the death of Olds' mother and these are heartbreaking poems. Olds said she fought the urge to title the collection The Mother, saying it would have been too neat a bookend to The Father. The poems are broken into two sections -- "Cassiopeia" (which is the cover image of the collection) and "One Secret Thing" -- and chronicle the discovery of her mother's brain tumor, the vigil at her deathbed and the scattering of her ashes at sea. While these poems are deeply personal, there is a universality about them that will cut close to home for anyone who has lost a parent. One Secret Thing effectively brings to a close a story Olds has been telling us in her last eight collections. There is a sense of release and hard-won peace by this brilliant collection's end. I drew a heavy sigh as I read the last poem, "Nereid Elegy," about Olds and her family putting her mother's ashes into the water along with flowers plucked from her garden. There is finally closure for Olds and this collection allows us to share it with her. What a gift.
January 20, 2021
Tumblr poezija koja je lepa kada čitaš stihove izvučene iz konteksta, a kada se susretneš sa celinom bude ti loše. Teške teme, mračne stvari, depresivne i bez izlaza. Neće mi ostati u sećanju zato što ne želim da mi ostane. Imala sam problem i sa stilom i formom, baš se graniči sa prozom. A s obzirom na to koliko je mračno, nije me nešto posebno dotaklo, samo mi je stvorilo nelagodu i anksy.
January 1, 2020
absolutely awful, made me want to take my skin off, 5 stars
August 12, 2009
This is brutal poetry. Sharon Olds mother is a "Mommie Dearest" character, but who'd have thought to put it into poetry? Extremely beautiful and painful at the same time. Is there any more complex relationship than that of mother and child? I had to cringe in self-recognition at some of the scenes in the ongoing struggle to fix this bond once and forever.
July 12, 2023
Really not what I was expecting, and I am still reeling. Nothing about the baby blue cover and the title prepared me. Every poem had a story in it and every story was horrible – many were about her mother. I was blindsided by how visceral and violent and erotic and corporal and gritty and tragic and personal these familial snapshots were. Was confused that Olds chose to open her book with a section about war (terrifyingly tragic but removed) while the rest was deeply personal stuff.
June 2, 2012
Perhaps because Sharon Olds writes about powerful emotions, she arouses strong feelings in readers and critics.
I suspect that what she does is at odds with the poetic mainstream in the UK. She is not terribly interested in formal cleverness, in inviting us to look at the inadequacy of language or in ironic detachment.
This is also a secular country, and some of us are made to feel uneasy by her quasi-religious zeal, her spiritiual intensity, her Biblical vocabulary.
Which isn't to say that Olds doesn't have many fans in the UK. I have always been one of them. Despite her use of autobiographical material, I think it's a huge mistake to dismiss her writing as narrowly self-centred. I feel the poetry is as outward as it is inward, unendlingly curious about the world of matter, of society, science, politics and myth.
With this collection I initially found it hard to 'tune in' to Sharon Olds' unflinching, unflagging voice. I had to go back - read all the poems a second time to appreciate the extraordinary detachment with which she writes about intimacy. Much of 'One Secret Thing' concerns her relationship with her mother, and I can't think of a poet who can evoke the dangerous currents of ambivalence as lyrically as she does.
Although I am quite familiar with some of Olds' predecessors, e.g. Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton, I now feel that I would to go back to Adrienne Rich,Robert Lowell and John Berryman - perhaps even to Walt Whitman....
I suspect that what she does is at odds with the poetic mainstream in the UK. She is not terribly interested in formal cleverness, in inviting us to look at the inadequacy of language or in ironic detachment.
This is also a secular country, and some of us are made to feel uneasy by her quasi-religious zeal, her spiritiual intensity, her Biblical vocabulary.
Which isn't to say that Olds doesn't have many fans in the UK. I have always been one of them. Despite her use of autobiographical material, I think it's a huge mistake to dismiss her writing as narrowly self-centred. I feel the poetry is as outward as it is inward, unendlingly curious about the world of matter, of society, science, politics and myth.
With this collection I initially found it hard to 'tune in' to Sharon Olds' unflinching, unflagging voice. I had to go back - read all the poems a second time to appreciate the extraordinary detachment with which she writes about intimacy. Much of 'One Secret Thing' concerns her relationship with her mother, and I can't think of a poet who can evoke the dangerous currents of ambivalence as lyrically as she does.
Although I am quite familiar with some of Olds' predecessors, e.g. Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton, I now feel that I would to go back to Adrienne Rich,Robert Lowell and John Berryman - perhaps even to Walt Whitman....
November 14, 2010
As a faithful reader of Sharon Olds, I wanted to read this one, for sure, and had read The Unswept Room not long before. Because One Secret Thing has that gripping intensity, I read it in spurts, and rested between. (I still must find Satan Says, her first book!)
This one moved into the "amazing" realm (5 stars here at Goodreads, though I am in the period of life when I tend not to judge, simply to enjoy, almost like Sharon Olds's mother on antidepressants...) in the last two sections of the book: Cassiopeia and One Secret Thing. I am a sucker for linked poems on an intensely human topic, here the mother-daughter bond as the mother moves relentlessly toward her death and the daughter moves relentlessly toward self-knowledge and escape-into-love.
Of course, after the ecstatic opening poem "Everything," the first section, "War," is also an amazing set of linked poems. I like the focus of this book, how the linked-poem-sections create that intensity of focus in the reader, and how individual poems, connected but not linked, provide moments not of relief, but of separate spots of focus, yes, as if sometimes we are looking at individual stars (maybe wishing on them) and sometimes we are looking at linked stars, constellations.
Who is doing the linking, though, but the looker? The one who named the constellation. The gazer. Then, here, the poet. And then the close reader.
This one moved into the "amazing" realm (5 stars here at Goodreads, though I am in the period of life when I tend not to judge, simply to enjoy, almost like Sharon Olds's mother on antidepressants...) in the last two sections of the book: Cassiopeia and One Secret Thing. I am a sucker for linked poems on an intensely human topic, here the mother-daughter bond as the mother moves relentlessly toward her death and the daughter moves relentlessly toward self-knowledge and escape-into-love.
Of course, after the ecstatic opening poem "Everything," the first section, "War," is also an amazing set of linked poems. I like the focus of this book, how the linked-poem-sections create that intensity of focus in the reader, and how individual poems, connected but not linked, provide moments not of relief, but of separate spots of focus, yes, as if sometimes we are looking at individual stars (maybe wishing on them) and sometimes we are looking at linked stars, constellations.
Who is doing the linking, though, but the looker? The one who named the constellation. The gazer. Then, here, the poet. And then the close reader.
November 7, 2016
The poems in this volume are as marvelous and eye-opening as any in Sharon Olds’s remarkable oeuvre. She revisits many of the themes and subjects that are focal to her work: dealing with adversity within the family and addressing conflicts among parents and children. But this collection also includes a section on war, a twelve-part poem that blazes with alarming imagery. The most powerful pieces, however, appear in the final section. These concern the passing of Olds’s mother. In overcoming her lifelong disconnect and anger with her mother, Olds’s poems offer a profound shift in her thoughts towards the solace that can be found through grieving and forgiveness. Her work is like experiencing language anew. Her wordplay is incredible. She epitomizes an artist recreating creation: taking on the inadequate reality of life and idealizing what is right while exposing all that is wrong with the world. She is the poet in quest of understanding the infernos of darkness and the wellsprings of eternal light. She is the poet who will defy everything in order to seek the truth. One Secret Thing stays with you the way great literature should.
June 17, 2013
The poems about her mother's final illness and death were the most affecting - any one whose relationship with their mother is fraught with ambivalence would surely relate to these...
January 21, 2022
Most of us are never conceived.
Many of us are never born -
we live in a private ocean for hours,
weeks, with out extra or missing limbs,
or holding our poor second head,
growing from our chest, in our arms. And many of us,
sea-fruit on its stem, dreaming kelp
and whelk, are culled in our early months.
And some who are born live only for minutes,
others for two, or for three, summers,
or four, and when they go, everything
goes - the earth, the firmament -
and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.
* * *
By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she though in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face -
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She's doing it now! Look!
She's doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humour. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.
* * *
When she was first in the air, upside down,
it linked us, the stem on which she had blossomed.
And they tied a knot in it, finishing
the work of her making. The limp remnant -
vein, and arteries, and Jelly of Wharton - had
lived as it would shrivel, by its own laws,
in a week it would wither away, while the normal
fetal holes in her heart closed,
the foramen ovale shutting the passage
the placental blood had swept, when her lungs,
flat in their dog-eared wet, had slept.
I was in shock, my life as I had known it
over. When they send us home, they said
to bathe the stump in alcohol
twice a day. I was stone afraid,
and yet she was so interesting -
moist, doubled-up, wondering, undersea
being. And the death-nose at the belly-centre wizened
and pizzled and ginsenged and wicked-witch'd until
the morning I undid her pajamas, and there, in the
night's cereus petals, lay her stamen,
in its place on her folded tent,
imbliu, nabhila, nafli, at last
purely hers, toward the womb an eye now
sightless, now safe in moated memory.
* * *
One secret thing happened
at the end of my mother's life, when I was
alone with her. I knew it should happen -
I knew someone was there, in there,
something less unlike my mother than
anything else on earth. And the jar
was there on the table, the space around it
pulled back from it, like the awestruck handmade
air around the creche, and her open
mouth was parched. It was late. The lid
eased off. I watched my finger draw through
the jelly, its egg-sex essence, the four
corners of the room were not creatures, were not
the four winds of the earth, if I did not
do this, what was I - I rubbed the cowlick of
petrolatum on the skin around where the
final measures of what was almost not
breath swayed, and her throat made a guttural
creek bed sound, like pebbly relief. But each
lip was stuck by chap to its row
of teeth, stuck fast. And then I worked
for my motherhood, my humanhood, I
slid my forefinger slowly back and
forth, along the scab-line and underlying
canines and incisors, upper lip and then
lower lip, until, like a basted
seam, softly ripped, what had been
joined was asunder, I ran the salve in-
side the folds, along the gums,
common mercy. The secret was
how deeply I did not want to touch
inside her, and how much the act
was an act of escape, my last chance
to free myself.
Many of us are never born -
we live in a private ocean for hours,
weeks, with out extra or missing limbs,
or holding our poor second head,
growing from our chest, in our arms. And many of us,
sea-fruit on its stem, dreaming kelp
and whelk, are culled in our early months.
And some who are born live only for minutes,
others for two, or for three, summers,
or four, and when they go, everything
goes - the earth, the firmament -
and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.
- Everything, pg. 3
* * *
By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she though in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face -
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She's doing it now! Look!
She's doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humour. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.
- Diagnosis, pg. 24
* * *
When she was first in the air, upside down,
it linked us, the stem on which she had blossomed.
And they tied a knot in it, finishing
the work of her making. The limp remnant -
vein, and arteries, and Jelly of Wharton - had
lived as it would shrivel, by its own laws,
in a week it would wither away, while the normal
fetal holes in her heart closed,
the foramen ovale shutting the passage
the placental blood had swept, when her lungs,
flat in their dog-eared wet, had slept.
I was in shock, my life as I had known it
over. When they send us home, they said
to bathe the stump in alcohol
twice a day. I was stone afraid,
and yet she was so interesting -
moist, doubled-up, wondering, undersea
being. And the death-nose at the belly-centre wizened
and pizzled and ginsenged and wicked-witch'd until
the morning I undid her pajamas, and there, in the
night's cereus petals, lay her stamen,
in its place on her folded tent,
imbliu, nabhila, nafli, at last
purely hers, toward the womb an eye now
sightless, now safe in moated memory.
- Umbilicus, pg. 47
* * *
One secret thing happened
at the end of my mother's life, when I was
alone with her. I knew it should happen -
I knew someone was there, in there,
something less unlike my mother than
anything else on earth. And the jar
was there on the table, the space around it
pulled back from it, like the awestruck handmade
air around the creche, and her open
mouth was parched. It was late. The lid
eased off. I watched my finger draw through
the jelly, its egg-sex essence, the four
corners of the room were not creatures, were not
the four winds of the earth, if I did not
do this, what was I - I rubbed the cowlick of
petrolatum on the skin around where the
final measures of what was almost not
breath swayed, and her throat made a guttural
creek bed sound, like pebbly relief. But each
lip was stuck by chap to its row
of teeth, stuck fast. And then I worked
for my motherhood, my humanhood, I
slid my forefinger slowly back and
forth, along the scab-line and underlying
canines and incisors, upper lip and then
lower lip, until, like a basted
seam, softly ripped, what had been
joined was asunder, I ran the salve in-
side the folds, along the gums,
common mercy. The secret was
how deeply I did not want to touch
inside her, and how much the act
was an act of escape, my last chance
to free myself.
- One Secret Thing, pg. 88
October 11, 2019
3/5
most of the poetry in this didn’t really resonate with me, but I enjoyed a few of them. the first poem in it was amazing.
some poems & lines i loved:
“Most of us are never conceived.
Many of us are never born—
we live in a private ocean for hours,
weeks, with our extra or missing limbs,
or holding our poor second head,
growing from our chest, in our arms. And many of us,
sea-fruit on its stem, dreaming kelp
and whelk, are culled in our early months.
And some who are born live only for minutes,
others for two, or for three, summers,
or four, and when they go, everything
goes—the earth, the firmament—
and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.”
— Everything
“The man hunch on the ground, holding
the arm of the corpse, is smiling. And the man
bending over, stabbing the chest,
A look of pleasant exertion on his face,
is smiling. The man lying on the ground is
staring up, shirt splattered black
like splashes around a well where the bucket has been
dipped and dipped. They hold his wrists, as if
displaying his span, a large bird
slung from its heavy wing tips,
and the handsome young man goes on stabbing
and smiling, and the other sits on the ground
holding the dead arm like a leash, smilingg.
— 8. The smile
“By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long, my mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.”
— Diagnosis
“There are things I will never know
about love. I strolled, ignorant
of my mother, among the tulips, beetle in its
holy stripes, she lay there and I walked
blind through music.
— Still Life
“I felt as if she had always wanted
to escape and now she had escaped. Then she turned,
slowly, to a thing of bone
marking where she had been.”
— Last Hour
most of the poetry in this didn’t really resonate with me, but I enjoyed a few of them. the first poem in it was amazing.
some poems & lines i loved:
“Most of us are never conceived.
Many of us are never born—
we live in a private ocean for hours,
weeks, with our extra or missing limbs,
or holding our poor second head,
growing from our chest, in our arms. And many of us,
sea-fruit on its stem, dreaming kelp
and whelk, are culled in our early months.
And some who are born live only for minutes,
others for two, or for three, summers,
or four, and when they go, everything
goes—the earth, the firmament—
and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.”
— Everything
“The man hunch on the ground, holding
the arm of the corpse, is smiling. And the man
bending over, stabbing the chest,
A look of pleasant exertion on his face,
is smiling. The man lying on the ground is
staring up, shirt splattered black
like splashes around a well where the bucket has been
dipped and dipped. They hold his wrists, as if
displaying his span, a large bird
slung from its heavy wing tips,
and the handsome young man goes on stabbing
and smiling, and the other sits on the ground
holding the dead arm like a leash, smilingg.
— 8. The smile
“By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long, my mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.”
— Diagnosis
“There are things I will never know
about love. I strolled, ignorant
of my mother, among the tulips, beetle in its
holy stripes, she lay there and I walked
blind through music.
— Still Life
“I felt as if she had always wanted
to escape and now she had escaped. Then she turned,
slowly, to a thing of bone
marking where she had been.”
— Last Hour
December 23, 2019
Leí este libro y me encantó. Diría que son dolores muy blancos, pero eso no quita que sean dolores. La guerra, la violencia del catolicismo, la sexualidad inapropiada del padrastro y de la propia madre, la silla eléctrica. Sharon Olds no escribe, canta, vuela en cada oración. Incluso en vivo, cuando recita, pareciera que mientras habla hace un bailecito. Me gustó también (y me robaré como recurso) el inventar palabras o jugar más con los encabalgamientos o usar la escritura como herramienta en sí misma, jugando con lo que solo la escritura, por el hecho de ser palabras escritas, puede lograr. En fin. Traduje nueve poemas de este libro en el contexto de un curso de traducción y quiero compartir mi favorito. Va la versión mía, va la versión en inglés.
Sleeves
for Edmund White
When Edmund said he is going to Hawaii
I was back there, 14 and never been kissed,
and the young man I liked has asked me to go
fo a walk that evening on the beach. And what filled
my mind, all day, were the arm-holes
of his short-sleeved bright-flowered cotton shirt, those
circles wich seemed of the diameter
of a pie tin—how would my hands, reaching
to go around him as he began to hug me, not
slip, like burrow mammals, into
those openings, not go to ground?
And the man was, I was telling Edmund,
the man was, what is it called, biff,
boff—buff, Edmund said—
the young man was a lifeguard
and a surfer, on the hard dune of each breast a
nipple like a tiny scatter of sand,
bits of coral amd starfish. And of course
my fear was desire, to pour, up,
into him, and into myself, and
swim, and strike together for the shore
—where we stood, later, in the late evening, and his
arms opened, and my arms opened,
and the origami closed itself
around the delicate, shut kiss.
And the aire smelled of plumeria
and frangipangi—when the plane door
opens, you will smell it! And Edmund said,
You know what homosexuals
are called in China? Cut Sleeves—
when the emperor’s lover fell asleep
in his arms, and lay sleeping on the silk of the royal
robe, and the emperor had to get up,
he cut off the sleeve of his gown, so as not
to wake the young man, but leave him in the deeps of his dream.
Mangas
Para Edmund White
Cuando Edmund dijo que iba a Hawaii
volví a ese entonces, 14 y nunca me habían besado,
y el muchacho que me gustaba me pidió ir
a dar un paseo esa tarde por la playa. Y lo que llenó
mi mente, todo el día, fueron los agujerobrazos
de su floreadabrillante camisa de algodón manga corta, esos
círculos que parecían del diámetro
de un molde para pastel—¿cómo podrían mis manos, desplegarse
a su alrededor cuando él me abrazara, sin
deslizarse, como madriguera de mamíferos, en
esas aberturas, y no irme al suelo?
Y el hombre era, le decía yo a Edmund,
el hombre era, como se dice, aaah,
oooh—ufff, dijo Edmund—
el muchacho era salvavidas
y surfista, en la dura duna de cada pecho un
pezón como una minúscula dispersión de arena,
pedacitos de coral y estrella de mar. Y por supuesto
mi miedo era deseo, de vertir, arriba,
en él, y en mí misma, y
nadar, y luchar juntos por la orilla
—donde nos detuvimos, después, tarde en el anochecer, y sus
brazos abiertos, y mis brazos abiertos,
y el origami se replegó
alrededor del delicado, beso cerrado.
Y el aire olía a flor plumeria
a frangipangi—cuando la puerta del avión
abra, ¡lo olerás! Y Edmund dijo,
¿Sabes cómo le dicen a la gente gay
en China? Mangas Cortadas—
cuando el amante del emperador se durmió
en sus brazos, y yacía dormido en la seda de la túnica
real, y el emperador tuvo que levantarse,
le cortó la manga del traje, para no despertar
al muchacho, sino dejarlo en la profundidad de su sueño.
Este libro no me lo regaló nadie, yo me lo compré, lo encargué usado por Amazon y me llegó una versión en muy buenas condiciones llena de timbres de la biblioteca pública de Las Vegas.
Sleeves
for Edmund White
When Edmund said he is going to Hawaii
I was back there, 14 and never been kissed,
and the young man I liked has asked me to go
fo a walk that evening on the beach. And what filled
my mind, all day, were the arm-holes
of his short-sleeved bright-flowered cotton shirt, those
circles wich seemed of the diameter
of a pie tin—how would my hands, reaching
to go around him as he began to hug me, not
slip, like burrow mammals, into
those openings, not go to ground?
And the man was, I was telling Edmund,
the man was, what is it called, biff,
boff—buff, Edmund said—
the young man was a lifeguard
and a surfer, on the hard dune of each breast a
nipple like a tiny scatter of sand,
bits of coral amd starfish. And of course
my fear was desire, to pour, up,
into him, and into myself, and
swim, and strike together for the shore
—where we stood, later, in the late evening, and his
arms opened, and my arms opened,
and the origami closed itself
around the delicate, shut kiss.
And the aire smelled of plumeria
and frangipangi—when the plane door
opens, you will smell it! And Edmund said,
You know what homosexuals
are called in China? Cut Sleeves—
when the emperor’s lover fell asleep
in his arms, and lay sleeping on the silk of the royal
robe, and the emperor had to get up,
he cut off the sleeve of his gown, so as not
to wake the young man, but leave him in the deeps of his dream.
Mangas
Para Edmund White
Cuando Edmund dijo que iba a Hawaii
volví a ese entonces, 14 y nunca me habían besado,
y el muchacho que me gustaba me pidió ir
a dar un paseo esa tarde por la playa. Y lo que llenó
mi mente, todo el día, fueron los agujerobrazos
de su floreadabrillante camisa de algodón manga corta, esos
círculos que parecían del diámetro
de un molde para pastel—¿cómo podrían mis manos, desplegarse
a su alrededor cuando él me abrazara, sin
deslizarse, como madriguera de mamíferos, en
esas aberturas, y no irme al suelo?
Y el hombre era, le decía yo a Edmund,
el hombre era, como se dice, aaah,
oooh—ufff, dijo Edmund—
el muchacho era salvavidas
y surfista, en la dura duna de cada pecho un
pezón como una minúscula dispersión de arena,
pedacitos de coral y estrella de mar. Y por supuesto
mi miedo era deseo, de vertir, arriba,
en él, y en mí misma, y
nadar, y luchar juntos por la orilla
—donde nos detuvimos, después, tarde en el anochecer, y sus
brazos abiertos, y mis brazos abiertos,
y el origami se replegó
alrededor del delicado, beso cerrado.
Y el aire olía a flor plumeria
a frangipangi—cuando la puerta del avión
abra, ¡lo olerás! Y Edmund dijo,
¿Sabes cómo le dicen a la gente gay
en China? Mangas Cortadas—
cuando el amante del emperador se durmió
en sus brazos, y yacía dormido en la seda de la túnica
real, y el emperador tuvo que levantarse,
le cortó la manga del traje, para no despertar
al muchacho, sino dejarlo en la profundidad de su sueño.
Este libro no me lo regaló nadie, yo me lo compré, lo encargué usado por Amazon y me llegó una versión en muy buenas condiciones llena de timbres de la biblioteca pública de Las Vegas.
June 27, 2025
Sharon Olds has a host of tics that will annoy any neophyte: all her poems are about a page long, no more, no less; she almost never uses stanza breaks; the poems are often entirely about herself, and when they aren’t, they’re usually not as good; and her love of words often manifests in neologisms or obscurities. But these aren’t outright failures, rather qualities that make Olds difficult and unique.
Take her obsession with anatomical terms that only a medical student might know: a poem like “The Scare” gets sagged down with “endometrium,” “myometrium,” “serosa,” “os,” and “fundus.” But this is a prayer-like fixation which, although eccentric, Olds cannot do without. The abstruse minuteness of these words becomes a way for her to talk about the chance doctors “might / have to remove [her] womb.” In the body-part blazon, she elegizes anything she might one day lose. Her magic trick, reconjuring the strange and unused portions of English in her poetry, will strike some as trite—if not purely exhausting, repeatedly reaching for the Dictionary to confirm or keep up. But the effect makes even a reader’s native language seem like terra incognita. Olds wants to be our explorer, our guide.
This, Sharon Olds’ eighth volume of poetry, (not including her selected poems), follows a run of equally strong performances—like Blood, Tin, Straw and The Unswept Room.
Take her obsession with anatomical terms that only a medical student might know: a poem like “The Scare” gets sagged down with “endometrium,” “myometrium,” “serosa,” “os,” and “fundus.” But this is a prayer-like fixation which, although eccentric, Olds cannot do without. The abstruse minuteness of these words becomes a way for her to talk about the chance doctors “might / have to remove [her] womb.” In the body-part blazon, she elegizes anything she might one day lose. Her magic trick, reconjuring the strange and unused portions of English in her poetry, will strike some as trite—if not purely exhausting, repeatedly reaching for the Dictionary to confirm or keep up. But the effect makes even a reader’s native language seem like terra incognita. Olds wants to be our explorer, our guide.
This, Sharon Olds’ eighth volume of poetry, (not including her selected poems), follows a run of equally strong performances—like Blood, Tin, Straw and The Unswept Room.
February 27, 2021
Not funny. Cried.
A friend bought me this. I was touched that they remembered I love Sharon Olds.
I sobbed at the final section of poems. It was so real. It was so true about growing up hating a parent and loving them again as they age.
Animal Dress is my favorite. I want to send it to my mother.
"And yet, now, if she goes, when she goes, to me it is like the departure of a whole small species of singing bird from the earth."
"My mother is still hitting and kicking people? ...Or do people hit and kick each other a lot, does everyone do it?"
"On her first antidepressant, my mother is adorable."
A friend bought me this. I was touched that they remembered I love Sharon Olds.
I sobbed at the final section of poems. It was so real. It was so true about growing up hating a parent and loving them again as they age.
Animal Dress is my favorite. I want to send it to my mother.
"And yet, now, if she goes, when she goes, to me it is like the departure of a whole small species of singing bird from the earth."
"My mother is still hitting and kicking people? ...Or do people hit and kick each other a lot, does everyone do it?"
"On her first antidepressant, my mother is adorable."
May 29, 2022
adored the muteness to this, and it gripped me until the end. i'm doing a cleaning spree of books on my phone that have been digitally rotting since last year, and bright dead things left a bitter aftertaste. this, however, was very good. really liked how the poems are structured individually, and how from top to bottom olds sweeps the reader with the language. austere and precise like an affectionate gunshot. really want to read more.
December 28, 2024
I found these poems very compelling--rarely do I find a poetry collection to be a page turner. Sharon Olds has a weird and whimsical imagination, but she is also dead serious at the same time. Her slices of life cut deep and bleed. And the shapes of the blood spatters sometimes make you laugh as well as cry. Reading this close to the first anniversary of my mother's death was fortuitous, but I think it was fortunate as well.
November 6, 2025
This book was my introduction to Sharon Olds' poetry. As other reviewers have noted, it is pretty raw and poignant in its impact. Olds' relationship to her mother is a central theme (as well as a problem to be worked out) throughout the book.
The poetry itself is challenging to keep up with. The imagery is often dreamlike, with images that are discordant and unsettling, but it holds one's attention. Keep a dictionary handy.
The poetry itself is challenging to keep up with. The imagery is often dreamlike, with images that are discordant and unsettling, but it holds one's attention. Keep a dictionary handy.
July 3, 2017
Some lovely terms of phrase and some nice imagery, but it still lacks something, even on the second reading. I think it is the harshness of the collection as a whole. It is tiring. I appreciate Olds honesty and skill, but it is exhausting to read, and really rather depressing. Having said that 'Diagnosis' was my favourite poem, which is darkly comic.
September 23, 2021
I found it just an okay read since there was not enough that really jumped out for me, except for the first poem and one or two from the second part. Those that I liked were about her relationship or her memory of her mother, not so much when her mother passes away, I'm sorry to admit. Also the chapters on War and on the whole baby thing didn't appeal to me.
Read
December 23, 2023back again, Sharon returns in 2008 from a bit of a lull, a hiatus. It's not one of her landmarks but it is characteristically very good, especially! the opening poem, Everything.. it's interesting to see how it came about, more of a 'problem' collection in taking the One Big thing - death of her mother - and working through. Title poem is gorgeous & horrifying in one, as you'd hope
May 2, 2018
I picked up this book because I saw the first poem in it, "Everything", on twitter and it hit me really hard. I did like the book, but that one piece had (perhaps unfairly) raised my expectations pretty high.
October 31, 2018
I do really enjoy Sharon Olds poetry and the end section of this volume is very moving as it describes the dying of her mother and the resolution of their relationship. The earlier poems in this volume I wasn’t so drawn to but the later poems will stay with me in thought for a long time.
August 29, 2020
Single-stanza poems, a handful of which are not familial. Many pieces on her dying/elderly mother. Another remake of the "First Boyfriend" poem. I didn't find this collection as poignant as her other collections. Less verve, passion, and more conversational language and dialogue.
September 13, 2020
The best poem in this book is the first poem, "Everything". None-the-less, this is a solid work of poetry done by a great poet. And if you like Sharon Olds' other work, you will likely like this as well.
October 31, 2023
I started reading this book years ago and set it aside, unable to bear the emotions it pulled up in me about my complicated relationship with my own mother. Well, now I've read it, and it's fucked me up. These poems blaze brilliantly.
July 28, 2018
I read half of it and can't continue anymore. I don't care about you or your tits or your family, Sharon. I. Don't. Care. This might even be the worst poetry book I've ever picked up.
November 24, 2019
Sunday afternoon poetry.... bare, potent and raw to the marrow. Highly recommended.
January 22, 2020
“There is something big coming,
bigger than love, bigger than aloneness.
She’s staying up all night for it.”
bigger than love, bigger than aloneness.
She’s staying up all night for it.”
January 29, 2021
Around the Year in 52 Books 2021: A book by an author whose career spanned more than 21 years.
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