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The Unswept Room
From Sharon Olds—a stunning new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor.
From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical, emotional, and spiritual sensations that are seldom the stuff of poetry.
These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.
From the Hardcover edition.
From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical, emotional, and spiritual sensations that are seldom the stuff of poetry.
These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.
From the Hardcover edition.
123 pages, Paperback
First published September 24, 2002
29 people are currently reading
686 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 98 reviews
September 14, 2020
Sharon Olds is so intense that each time I read her I think she must have squeezed out every last drop. Then, she publishes another collection.
Her poetry feels close to prose, sweeping up into a river of motion and fluids, heart and hurt, and leaving you off in a place often far from where you started. Her obsession is the stuff of relationships in all its forms, her writing sensual, dynamic, organic.
This 2002 collection, nominated for The National Book Award, is full of poems I loved, such as “The Borders,“ and “First Weeks,” about the birth of her daughter, and “Sunday Night,” and “His Costume,” about her father’s transgressions, but my favorite collection of hers is still The Dead and The Living. Stag’s Leap, which I haven’t read, won The Pulitzer in 2013.
Her poetry feels close to prose, sweeping up into a river of motion and fluids, heart and hurt, and leaving you off in a place often far from where you started. Her obsession is the stuff of relationships in all its forms, her writing sensual, dynamic, organic.
This 2002 collection, nominated for The National Book Award, is full of poems I loved, such as “The Borders,“ and “First Weeks,” about the birth of her daughter, and “Sunday Night,” and “His Costume,” about her father’s transgressions, but my favorite collection of hers is still The Dead and The Living. Stag’s Leap, which I haven’t read, won The Pulitzer in 2013.
May 29, 2018
The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds is a book of poetry published in 2005. Stag’s Leap, published in 2012, documents the end of her 32-year marriage, with great pain and anguish, so it is tempting as I read this for (maybe) the first time, to examine The Unswept Room only in terms of that relationship, which over time in her poetry is passionate, sexual and intensely loving. Over time we don’t so much get to know him as we get to know her view of him/them/their relational bodies, throughout her—what is sometimes called primarily by male critics—“confessional” poetry, (because men don’t typically write about these subjects in the same way, they have to dismiss it in this way). But it is powerful, raw, fun, impressive, all of it.
Olds once said, “I write the way I perceive, I guess. It’s not really simple, I don’t think, but it’s about ordinary things—feeling about things, about people. I’m not an intellectual. I’m not an abstract thinker. And I’m interested in ordinary life.”
The body, primarily the female body, and hers in particular, from birth to death, from lover to mother to empty nester to mother caretaker is viscerally described and explored by Olds, and usually celebrated. Olds is the poetic daughter of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in all of their anguished and thrilled passion of the body. Who else writes so boldly about sex and birth and motherhood and abortion and aging/dying bodies? Beth Ann Fennelly comes to mind; Kim Addonizio. Many others, surely, but the anger and joy of sex comes through surely in Olds’s poetry here and over time. The rage and despair she shares at the hands of her father’s abuse is touched on here as in other places. But above all here, her sexual relationship with her husband is highlighted, written about beautifully and not trivially or sentimentally.
“Then, when we were joined, I became
shyer. I became completed, joyful”
But in “A Time of Passion” maybe we see the beginning of the end?
The poem opens:
“Then we entered a time of passion so
extreme it was almost calm, the body
doubling what it wanted to bear. Anguish
and pleasure played each other.”
But ends:
“It never crossed my mind that he no longer
loved me, that we had left the realm of love.”
Augh, the anguish, out of so much loving.
But for her a woman’s body is always already sensually alive, even in the first hour of life, as in “First Hour:”
“The air
was softly touching my skin and tongue
entering and drawing forth the little
sighs I did not know as mine.”
And in a session of kissing she has with a girlfriend and that girl's boyfriend. Alive, the world opening!
And in parenting and relating to her mother, always for Olds it is with her body and in terms of other women's bodies.
But she also writes of other men and their moments in these poems:
In “Bible Study: 71 B. C.” she writes with rage of the crucifixion of Spartacus and 6,000 other people by Crassus. She writes with rage, too, of the memory of her father in restaurants putting his hands up waitresses’ skirts and thinking,
“I wish I had stuck
A fork in that arm, driven the tines
Deep, heard the squeak of muscle
Felt the skid on bone.”
Olds writes of race, kind of indirectly, in “Grey Girl”:
“You want to know about white?
I’ll tell you about white people
I lived in close proximity to them
And I was them, that meanness they used on me
Was what I was made of.”
There’s a lovely elegy to Jane Kenyon, in “April, New Hampshire.”
She writes of losing a friend in an accident,
“Glass, bone, flesh and family:"
“This was the world, maybe the only one.”
In “The Untangling,” Olds talks of trying to untangle the detritus of love and family and sex: “pansy, peony, dusk, starry, unviolate.” These disparate things that make us who we are.
Olds writes sort of wondrously and openly of her own vagina, and of seeing, as a young girl, her mother’s vagina before entering the tub, so there’s that physicality you either like or not, but it feels real and honest
She also writes tenderly of the wonder and grace of seeing her grown daughter and son sleeping in a room. She also writes of the moment of falling in love with her daughter:
“When she smiled at me
delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming
I fell in love, I became human.”
So there’s sweetness and the visceral, love and rage, in a powerful book from one of my favorite poets.
Olds once said, “I write the way I perceive, I guess. It’s not really simple, I don’t think, but it’s about ordinary things—feeling about things, about people. I’m not an intellectual. I’m not an abstract thinker. And I’m interested in ordinary life.”
The body, primarily the female body, and hers in particular, from birth to death, from lover to mother to empty nester to mother caretaker is viscerally described and explored by Olds, and usually celebrated. Olds is the poetic daughter of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in all of their anguished and thrilled passion of the body. Who else writes so boldly about sex and birth and motherhood and abortion and aging/dying bodies? Beth Ann Fennelly comes to mind; Kim Addonizio. Many others, surely, but the anger and joy of sex comes through surely in Olds’s poetry here and over time. The rage and despair she shares at the hands of her father’s abuse is touched on here as in other places. But above all here, her sexual relationship with her husband is highlighted, written about beautifully and not trivially or sentimentally.
“Then, when we were joined, I became
shyer. I became completed, joyful”
But in “A Time of Passion” maybe we see the beginning of the end?
The poem opens:
“Then we entered a time of passion so
extreme it was almost calm, the body
doubling what it wanted to bear. Anguish
and pleasure played each other.”
But ends:
“It never crossed my mind that he no longer
loved me, that we had left the realm of love.”
Augh, the anguish, out of so much loving.
But for her a woman’s body is always already sensually alive, even in the first hour of life, as in “First Hour:”
“The air
was softly touching my skin and tongue
entering and drawing forth the little
sighs I did not know as mine.”
And in a session of kissing she has with a girlfriend and that girl's boyfriend. Alive, the world opening!
And in parenting and relating to her mother, always for Olds it is with her body and in terms of other women's bodies.
But she also writes of other men and their moments in these poems:
In “Bible Study: 71 B. C.” she writes with rage of the crucifixion of Spartacus and 6,000 other people by Crassus. She writes with rage, too, of the memory of her father in restaurants putting his hands up waitresses’ skirts and thinking,
“I wish I had stuck
A fork in that arm, driven the tines
Deep, heard the squeak of muscle
Felt the skid on bone.”
Olds writes of race, kind of indirectly, in “Grey Girl”:
“You want to know about white?
I’ll tell you about white people
I lived in close proximity to them
And I was them, that meanness they used on me
Was what I was made of.”
There’s a lovely elegy to Jane Kenyon, in “April, New Hampshire.”
She writes of losing a friend in an accident,
“Glass, bone, flesh and family:"
“This was the world, maybe the only one.”
In “The Untangling,” Olds talks of trying to untangle the detritus of love and family and sex: “pansy, peony, dusk, starry, unviolate.” These disparate things that make us who we are.
Olds writes sort of wondrously and openly of her own vagina, and of seeing, as a young girl, her mother’s vagina before entering the tub, so there’s that physicality you either like or not, but it feels real and honest
She also writes tenderly of the wonder and grace of seeing her grown daughter and son sleeping in a room. She also writes of the moment of falling in love with her daughter:
“When she smiled at me
delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming
I fell in love, I became human.”
So there’s sweetness and the visceral, love and rage, in a powerful book from one of my favorite poets.
August 27, 2020
La habitación sin barrer es perfecto para quienes quieren leer poesía con narrativa.
Los poemas tienen una potencia conmovedora. La traducción está muy cuidada.
Es un libro que releo todo el tiempo. Me gusta abrirlo aleatoriamente porque se que lo que voy a leer, siempre va a ser bueno.
Los poemas tienen una potencia conmovedora. La traducción está muy cuidada.
Es un libro que releo todo el tiempo. Me gusta abrirlo aleatoriamente porque se que lo que voy a leer, siempre va a ser bueno.
February 5, 2023
Ranking poetry collections is admittedly a dumb exercise, but we're on Goodreads and this is my third Sharold Olds collection in as many months, so I'll say I liked it more than
The Wellspring
and less than
Stag's Leap
-- but also Stag's Leap is one of my favorite collections ever and I still have, like, seven more Olds books checked out from the library, so this ranking really isn't telling you anything.
Reading her work -- and all autobiographical work, I suppose -- is a little like time travel because I know that her husband left her in 1997 but that she promised her kids she wouldn't write too much about it for ten years. This book was published in 2002, so these poems were probably written both before and after he left but put together into a collection after. 2002 didn't have Stag's Leap yet and didn't know about her promise to her children. But I do, and I couldn't help looking for signs. How much would she say?
She's a professional, so she waits until the very end -- the last four poems: "Past Future Imperfect" (I mean, even that title, come onnnn), "Wilderness, and the penultimate "Psalm:"
I gnaw very softly on his jaw, Would you want me to
eat you, in the Andes, in a plane crash, I murmur,
to survive? Yes. We smile. He asks,
Would you want me to eat you to survive? I would love it,
I cry out. We almost sleep, there is a series of
arms around us and between us, in sets,
touches given as if received. Did you think
we were going to turn into each other?, and I get
one of those smiles, as if his face
is a speckled, rubbled, sandy, satiny
cactus-flower eight inches across.
Yes, he whispers. I know he is humoring,
rote sweet-talking. A sliver of late
sun is coming through, between the curtains,
it lights the scaly surfaces
of my knuckles, its line like a needle held,
to cleanse it, above a match. I move
my wedding finger to stand in the slit
of flame. From the ring's curve there rises
a fan of borealis fur
like the first instant of sunrise. Do not
tell me this could end. Do not tell me.
And then of course the collection ends immediately after with "The Unswept," a poem that describes the ugly, grimy bits and pieces of the cover art's mosaic and what you might find, in Sharon's words, "under love's table."
Reading her work -- and all autobiographical work, I suppose -- is a little like time travel because I know that her husband left her in 1997 but that she promised her kids she wouldn't write too much about it for ten years. This book was published in 2002, so these poems were probably written both before and after he left but put together into a collection after. 2002 didn't have Stag's Leap yet and didn't know about her promise to her children. But I do, and I couldn't help looking for signs. How much would she say?
She's a professional, so she waits until the very end -- the last four poems: "Past Future Imperfect" (I mean, even that title, come onnnn), "Wilderness, and the penultimate "Psalm:"
I gnaw very softly on his jaw, Would you want me to
eat you, in the Andes, in a plane crash, I murmur,
to survive? Yes. We smile. He asks,
Would you want me to eat you to survive? I would love it,
I cry out. We almost sleep, there is a series of
arms around us and between us, in sets,
touches given as if received. Did you think
we were going to turn into each other?, and I get
one of those smiles, as if his face
is a speckled, rubbled, sandy, satiny
cactus-flower eight inches across.
Yes, he whispers. I know he is humoring,
rote sweet-talking. A sliver of late
sun is coming through, between the curtains,
it lights the scaly surfaces
of my knuckles, its line like a needle held,
to cleanse it, above a match. I move
my wedding finger to stand in the slit
of flame. From the ring's curve there rises
a fan of borealis fur
like the first instant of sunrise. Do not
tell me this could end. Do not tell me.
And then of course the collection ends immediately after with "The Unswept," a poem that describes the ugly, grimy bits and pieces of the cover art's mosaic and what you might find, in Sharon's words, "under love's table."
October 29, 2021
On a second read I had to reconsider. It is a powerful book. Sharon is a powerful poet.
November 7, 2016
Sharon Olds epitomizes a poet who unearths her life and exposes her soul, grating both of them clean. The honesty and candor in which she pursues her subject matter is akin to an excavation. She digs deep to locate the bone and marrow of experience, and she simultaneously resurrects her life through the manifold pains she has endured and also those she has brought upon herself. She spares no one in talking about her abuse as a child. But her poetry is not exclusively about sorrow. It is equally about pleasure, bliss, and love. She holds nothing back in regard to examining what love means, whether it is parental, familial, or spousal love. Her aim is often transformative: to be for her family and children what her parents were not for her. She wants to tell her secrets in order to understand and overcome her pain. Each of her poems, therefore, mesmerizes with how she can embody a captivating story, whether it is exploring the rigors of life, confronting the past, raising children, growing older, or adapting to the unpredictability of love. The language she employs is rapturous and oftentimes seismic in its depth and range. In trying to bear and suffer through everything, Sharon Olds not only confronts life, she hopes for a better one. Ultimately, her poetry is about redemption. The Unswept Room is an extraordinary collection.
July 8, 2025
Chasing the very first hour,
to get back to a time,
when we hated no one.
to get back to a time,
when we hated no one.
August 25, 2024
"No me digan que esto podía terminarse. No me digan" 🌙
December 14, 2019
3.5
The Unswept Room shows the dark rooms of identity we all find hard to walk in and try to undo ourselves from this web of identity that are tied to us from the time we are destined to be born into a certain family. Sharon has undertaken this deeply soul stirring and sentimental journey, through these poems, while always preserving a sense of humour and wit.
These are family, marriage, birth and body poems. Wilderness is my favorite poem from the collection, as it is so transcending.
In this collection, Sharon writes about her child abuse and her dysfunctional parents. Mostly the poems have to do with her mother. They are not intense or heavy, but rather very light-hearted, which is perhaps, the sign of the poet's emotional healing.
"I did not/imagine I could ever leave my mother,/ mostly I was her, in distorted form." (5 cents a Peek)
Perhaps when she refers to people here, she talks about her parents.
"You want to know about white people?
I'll tell you about white people,
I lived in close proximity to the
and I was them, that meanness they used on me
was what I was made of." (Grey Girl)
Then there are birth poems which are beautiful — her own, and that of her daughter — how a mother is born with the birth of the child. (The Borders, First Weeks) and death poem (Heaven to Be)
The sensual ones about her husband, when she was still happily married to him. (The Wedding Vow, The Hour After, If, Someday, A Time Of Passion, Psalm)
".... I don't sense, in him,
the will to change me or dislike me, he seems like
a bed of heal-all, I lied down, in him,
and sleep. Or not
sleep — and no touch
is the same with him as any touch has been,
and I feel at home in him, and of him,
as if, by now, I am a part of him." (Herbal Wrap)
"... I thought, now is the moment
I could become more loving, and my hands moved shyly
over him, secret as heaven,
and my mouth spoke, and in my beloved's voice, by the bones of my head, the fields
groaned, and then I joined him again,
not shy, not bold, released, entering
the true home, where the trees bend down along the
ground and her stand, then we lay together
panting, as if saved from some disaster ceaseless
instants, it came to pass what I have
heard about, it came to me
that I did not know I was separate
from this man, I did not know I was lonely." (The Shyness)
Then, she maintains a sense of gratefulness, as the damage of the past, now no longer looms over them and her children are not damaged because of it.
"Then, one later afternoon,
I understand: the harm my father
did us is receding. I thought his harm as stronger than that,
like God's harm. . . and she says, "My son and daughter are grown, they are well as if by some miracle." (Directly)
WILDERNESS
When I lay down, for the night, on the desert,
on my back, and dozed, and my eyes opened,
my gaze rushed up, as if falling up
into the sky,
and I saw the open eye of night, all
guileless, all Iris of a starshine grey,
scattered with clusters of brilliant pupils.
I gazed, and dozed, and as my eyelids lifted I would
plummet up out of the atmosphere,
plunging and gasping as if I'd missed
a stair. I would sleep, and come to, and sleep,
and every time that I opened my eyes
I fell up deep into the universe.
It looked crowded, hollow, intricate, elastic,
I did not feel I could really see it
because I did not know what it was
that I was seeing. When my lids parted,
there was real — absolute,
crisp, impersonal, intimate,
benign without sweetness, I was soaring out, my
speed suddenly increasing to it's speed, I was
entering another dimension, and her
one in which I belong, as if
not only the earth while I am here, but space,
and death, and existence without me, are my home.
The Unswept Room shows the dark rooms of identity we all find hard to walk in and try to undo ourselves from this web of identity that are tied to us from the time we are destined to be born into a certain family. Sharon has undertaken this deeply soul stirring and sentimental journey, through these poems, while always preserving a sense of humour and wit.
These are family, marriage, birth and body poems. Wilderness is my favorite poem from the collection, as it is so transcending.
In this collection, Sharon writes about her child abuse and her dysfunctional parents. Mostly the poems have to do with her mother. They are not intense or heavy, but rather very light-hearted, which is perhaps, the sign of the poet's emotional healing.
"I did not/imagine I could ever leave my mother,/ mostly I was her, in distorted form." (5 cents a Peek)
Perhaps when she refers to people here, she talks about her parents.
"You want to know about white people?
I'll tell you about white people,
I lived in close proximity to the
and I was them, that meanness they used on me
was what I was made of." (Grey Girl)
Then there are birth poems which are beautiful — her own, and that of her daughter — how a mother is born with the birth of the child. (The Borders, First Weeks) and death poem (Heaven to Be)
The sensual ones about her husband, when she was still happily married to him. (The Wedding Vow, The Hour After, If, Someday, A Time Of Passion, Psalm)
".... I don't sense, in him,
the will to change me or dislike me, he seems like
a bed of heal-all, I lied down, in him,
and sleep. Or not
sleep — and no touch
is the same with him as any touch has been,
and I feel at home in him, and of him,
as if, by now, I am a part of him." (Herbal Wrap)
"... I thought, now is the moment
I could become more loving, and my hands moved shyly
over him, secret as heaven,
and my mouth spoke, and in my beloved's voice, by the bones of my head, the fields
groaned, and then I joined him again,
not shy, not bold, released, entering
the true home, where the trees bend down along the
ground and her stand, then we lay together
panting, as if saved from some disaster ceaseless
instants, it came to pass what I have
heard about, it came to me
that I did not know I was separate
from this man, I did not know I was lonely." (The Shyness)
Then, she maintains a sense of gratefulness, as the damage of the past, now no longer looms over them and her children are not damaged because of it.
"Then, one later afternoon,
I understand: the harm my father
did us is receding. I thought his harm as stronger than that,
like God's harm. . . and she says, "My son and daughter are grown, they are well as if by some miracle." (Directly)
WILDERNESS
When I lay down, for the night, on the desert,
on my back, and dozed, and my eyes opened,
my gaze rushed up, as if falling up
into the sky,
and I saw the open eye of night, all
guileless, all Iris of a starshine grey,
scattered with clusters of brilliant pupils.
I gazed, and dozed, and as my eyelids lifted I would
plummet up out of the atmosphere,
plunging and gasping as if I'd missed
a stair. I would sleep, and come to, and sleep,
and every time that I opened my eyes
I fell up deep into the universe.
It looked crowded, hollow, intricate, elastic,
I did not feel I could really see it
because I did not know what it was
that I was seeing. When my lids parted,
there was real — absolute,
crisp, impersonal, intimate,
benign without sweetness, I was soaring out, my
speed suddenly increasing to it's speed, I was
entering another dimension, and her
one in which I belong, as if
not only the earth while I am here, but space,
and death, and existence without me, are my home.
February 2, 2020
I don't remember how I discovered Sharon Olds, but I'm so glad I did. Her poetry is confessional, narrative, bold, intimate, sometimes mysterious but largely accessible -- everything I love in a poet.
In The Unswept Room, there is an arc of sadness that governs the poems, because they obviously cover a part of her life when she went through a divorce, but that doesn't emerge until the poems at the end of the book. The sadness is palpable because many of the earlier poems are paeans to the intimate, rich sex life she had with her husband, in which she is able to be deeply erotic without being prurient. She also focuses many of her poems on her difficult relationship with her mother, and how the balance of their relationship shifted as she got older and her mother coped with widowhood.
She has, quite simply, become one of my all-time favorites. Here is one example:
First Weeks
Sharon Olds
Those first weeks, I don’t know if I knew
how to love our daughter. Her face looked crushed,
crumpled with worry -- and not even
despair, but just depression, a look of
endurance. The skin of her face was finely
wrinkled, there were wisps of hair on her ears,
she looked a little like a squirrel, suspicious,
tranced. And smallish, 6.13,
wizened -- she looked as if she were wincing
away from me without moving. The first
moment I had seen her, my glasses off,
in the delivery room, a blur of blood,
and blue skin, and limbs, I had known her,
upside down, and they righted her, and there
came that faint, almost sexual, wail, and her
whole body flushed rose.
When I saw her next, she was bound in cotton,
someone else had cleaned her, wiped
the inside of my body off her
and combed her hair in narrow scary
plough-lines. She was ten days early;
sleepy, the breast so engorged it stood out nearly
even with the nipple, her lips would so much as
approach it, it would hiss and spray.
In two days we took her home, she shrieked
and whimpered, like a dream of a burn victim,
and when she was quiet, she would lie there and peer, not quite
anxiously. I didn’t blame her,
she’d been born to my mother’s daughter. I would kneel
and gaze at her, and pity her.
All day I nursed her, all night I walked her,
and napped, and nursed, and walked her. And then,
one day, she looked at me, as if
she knew me. She lay along my forearm, fed, and
gazed at me as if remembering me,
as if she had known me, and liked me, and was getting
her memory back. When she smiled at me,
delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming,
I fell in love, I became human.
In The Unswept Room, there is an arc of sadness that governs the poems, because they obviously cover a part of her life when she went through a divorce, but that doesn't emerge until the poems at the end of the book. The sadness is palpable because many of the earlier poems are paeans to the intimate, rich sex life she had with her husband, in which she is able to be deeply erotic without being prurient. She also focuses many of her poems on her difficult relationship with her mother, and how the balance of their relationship shifted as she got older and her mother coped with widowhood.
She has, quite simply, become one of my all-time favorites. Here is one example:
First Weeks
Sharon Olds
Those first weeks, I don’t know if I knew
how to love our daughter. Her face looked crushed,
crumpled with worry -- and not even
despair, but just depression, a look of
endurance. The skin of her face was finely
wrinkled, there were wisps of hair on her ears,
she looked a little like a squirrel, suspicious,
tranced. And smallish, 6.13,
wizened -- she looked as if she were wincing
away from me without moving. The first
moment I had seen her, my glasses off,
in the delivery room, a blur of blood,
and blue skin, and limbs, I had known her,
upside down, and they righted her, and there
came that faint, almost sexual, wail, and her
whole body flushed rose.
When I saw her next, she was bound in cotton,
someone else had cleaned her, wiped
the inside of my body off her
and combed her hair in narrow scary
plough-lines. She was ten days early;
sleepy, the breast so engorged it stood out nearly
even with the nipple, her lips would so much as
approach it, it would hiss and spray.
In two days we took her home, she shrieked
and whimpered, like a dream of a burn victim,
and when she was quiet, she would lie there and peer, not quite
anxiously. I didn’t blame her,
she’d been born to my mother’s daughter. I would kneel
and gaze at her, and pity her.
All day I nursed her, all night I walked her,
and napped, and nursed, and walked her. And then,
one day, she looked at me, as if
she knew me. She lay along my forearm, fed, and
gazed at me as if remembering me,
as if she had known me, and liked me, and was getting
her memory back. When she smiled at me,
delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming,
I fell in love, I became human.
July 12, 2024
AAAAH, no puedo hablar normalmente de la poesía de Sharon Olds, me dan ganas de escribir una reseña gritando. Me siento bendecida cada vez que estoy dentro de su visión e intensidad. Lo inaccesible de los momentos maravillosos ella los hace accesibles, lo que ama te hace amarlo. No nos abandones nunca, te lo ruegooooo.
May 20, 2025
Sharon Olds was one of the first poets I ever read, and she does not disappoint. Her poems, circling (the failures of) parenthood and marriage, are as intense and relevant as ever. As the book progresses, the more pages I dog-eared — her collection crescendos.
Favorite poems: The Hour After; The Older; Herbal Wrap; April, New Hampshire; Chamber Thicket; S; Past Future Imperfect; The Unswept.
Favorite poems: The Hour After; The Older; Herbal Wrap; April, New Hampshire; Chamber Thicket; S; Past Future Imperfect; The Unswept.
June 19, 2025
This book is a carefully balanced collection from a writer at the height of her powers—none of her explorations are new, everything here has been written about before, but Olds is standing on top of the mountain left by her previous research in the fields of human memory, trauma, love, loss, and mortality. From these summits, she is looking still further out at the world.
June 16, 2019
“First Hour”, “The Older” and “Heaven to Be” and “Wilderness” are beautiful.
January 26, 2022
That hour, I was most myself. I had shrugged
my mother slowly off, I lay there
taking my first breaths, as if
the air of he room was blowing me
like a bubble. All I had to do
was go out along the line of my gaze and back,
out and back, on gravity's silk, the
pressure of the air a caress, smelling on my
self her creamy blood. The air
was softly touching my skin and tongue,
entering me and drawing forth the little
sighs I did not know as mine.
I was not afraid. I lay in the quiet
and looked, and did the wordless thought,
my mind was getting its oxygen
direct, the rich mix by mouth.
I hated no one. I gazed and gazed,
and everything was interesting, I was
free, not yet in love, I did not
belong to anyone, I had drunk
no milk, yet - no one had
my heart. I was not very human. I did not
know there was anyone else. I lay
like a god, for an hour, then they came for me,
and took me to my mother.
* * *
The day my class was to go to the circus,
I sidled into the bathroom, early,
and stood on tiptoe, up into the bottom
corner of the mirror, and leaned on the sink,
and slowly cut off my eyelashes
down close to the eyelid. I had no idea what I was
doing, or why, I studied the effect
- not bad, a little stark - but when I saw the effect
on my mother, not just anger, but pity
and horror, I was interested.
I think I had almost given up on being
a girl, on trying to grow up to be a woman like my mother,
I wanted to get disadopted
and go home to be the baby with the calf's head,
home to my birth mother the bearded lady,
my father the sword swallower stopped mid-swallow,
one with the sword. I had tried to act normal,
but when the inspiration came
I felt I was meant to act on it,
to look at my mom with my gaze trimmed to a seer's
and see her see me for an instant, see
her irises contact. I did not
imagine I could ever leave my mother,
mostly I was her, in distorted form,
but at least for that second the itsy scissors
spoke to her with their birdy beak,
skreeek, skreeek, witch whinge. And when
my lashes grew back, no thicker no thinner no
shorter no longer, my mother sat me
down, and taught me to bat them, to look
sidelong, blindly, and shudder them at seven beats a second.
* * *
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.
* * *
When I swung the lever over, and the curtain
slammed shut, and I looked up,
there it was, an oval sticker
like a flat cocoon spun above the levers,
as if I were not the only living
thing in there. For a moment, I felt I could
almost understand following
the leader of the embryo,
its huge, unvarious head, its messy
beauty, the meteor-tail of its body,
its rushing in place, I could almost take it
for my god. But to make
others take it -
to sacrifice them to it - it looked archaic,
its markings those of a Pandora sphinx
or a death's-head moth. As I glanced from candidate to
candidate, in my side-gaze the foetus
looked like an eye with an uneven iris,
and its gaze seemed to be following me -
alone in the booth, the way a woman
is supposed to be alone with her body.
She doesn't have to give it to anyone anymore,
not even a child of her own conceiving.
A man has gone up the road of the air
and walked on the moon. A woman has gone
up the passage of her body to the rosy
attic of the womb, with her whisk broom,
weeping on singing - or larvum, no intricate
orb-web, no chrystalis
bu she decides.
* * *
It's curious and sweet to slip it out
and look inside, to see what's there,
like a treasure hunt, small toys
and dolls tucked into the root-floor of the woods,
or tilt up a stone in the yard and find,
in the groove of her path, the flame-brown newt. Now I
read the shallow cup of dregs,
shreds like clothes torn away in
eagerness - cloth of the bodies - which rips
to a cloud of threads. Here our daughter
never picked her finicky way,
here our son never somersaulted,
here only our not-children
advanced, and dropped, and surged forward
and were cut down, there a coil
of tail, here a ladyfinger, a
curl, a bone of the twin. When I have reached
into myself, and glistened out the dome,
I search its planetarium sky
for its weather, ivory nimbus, reach
of summer showers - these are the heavens
under which the grateful bodies
went to earth, dense with contentment,
moving, together, for those hour-long
moments, in a mattery paradise,
I gaze into the cumulus
of spermicide, I bless the lollers who
stay in that other sphere as we come
like surf on the shore of it.
* * *
All day I had a feeling I had met someone
- someone I had wanted to meet, and been
afraid to meet, someone important, maybe
foreign, or someone I had thought dead
and then seen alive. The night before,
I had seen Jesus's bearded face
on the ceiling, within the curves of plaster
vine-coil, as if I were looking at
some modest, washed area of land
or water, or the first, clean clay -
as if I were seeing the blankness of a good
human, the desirelessness
of a grown-up parent, bu it was not that...
Whom had I found who had been lost to me? I
could not think - and then, I remembered
the round, plump, woven-silver
mirror, which I had held, this bright
morning, between my legs, I had seen,
for the first time, myself, face to feral face.
* * *
To end up in an old hotel suite
with one's nearly-grown children, who are sleeping, is a kind
of Eden. The one in the second bed
rests her head on two pillows - I did not know that -
as she sleeps. The one on the couch, under candlewick
chenille, has here and there as he turns
the stuffed animal his sister just gave him
for his twentieth birthday. I roam in the half-
dark, getting ready for bed, I stalk
my happiness. I'm like someone from the past
allowed to come back, I am with our darlings,
they are dreaming, safe. Perhaps it's especially like
Eden since this is my native coast,
it smells something like my earliest life,
fog, plumeria, eucalyptus, it is
broken, the killership of my family -
it is stopped within me, the complex gear
that translated its motion. When I turn out the light and lie
down, I feel as if I'm at the apex
of a triangle, and then, with a Copernican
swerve, I feel that the apex is my daughter,
and then my son, I am that background figure, that
source figure the mother. We are not,
strictly speaking, mortal. We cast
beloveds into the future. I fall
asleep, briefly living forever
in the room with our son and daughter.
* * *
When our daughter said Mom, in a low voice,
some background music in the restaurant,
almost too low to hear, was doing
glottal-stop riffs. Her throaty, intense
call was like the one she uses
to draw my notice to a baby. She moved
her eyes to one side, signaling me
to look, over her shoulder, at a table
where the mouth of an oldish man was moving
together with the bass-amp sounds - they were
his voice. Our daughter's eyes opened
wide, a half-second, showing ecstatic
eyeball around the iris, and the back of my
scalp relaxed, swallowing his tones
like a portion of sleep, such low notes,
reminding my spin of its ancestry
inside the earth, as if I were sinking
down through shale, slate, bedrock,
feldspar, gypsum, serpentine,
iron, descending through older and older
strata, Cambrian, Precambrian,
back before we remember, to a time
it was not possible for an elder to harm a younger.
* * *
In the medicine aisle, I saw the headline,
the father lost, and was the murder of the father
connected to the son. I kneeled down.
To believe his father might have died because of
him? The door to where he'd come from shut
behind him - almost as if it were better
he had not been born? I felt a furnace
in my lings, as if for him. Now,
would his gift die, how could he sly through the
air among the others, slipping between them like the
freest being on earth? Because
I have felt I have harmed my family, I half believe it,
all day I prayed that from second to second
he could bear to breathe. What did I know,
what did I know. Toward evening, I saw that I had
never understood what he faced, I had
thought he was complete, like a seraph, as if
nothing could get hold of him, no
hope to go beyond the pale, far
gone in power, beyond reach,
out of mortal range - unlike
a young man on a vision quest,
who goes, in hunger and thirst, when adulthood
approaches, out onto the plain where his father
went before him, and his father's father,
and his father's father's father, and his father's
father's father's father's father's father.
* * *
Whatever she was to me, she was
the human caught in something she could hardly
bear, she was like a flying keening
being, limed and jessed, a small
soprano of the trees, of ngetal and luis,
reed and quickbeam. No one said
I had come from inside her, yet from where else but that
green music, and at birth I had stepped
somehow back, out of the laurel into
which I had rushed away from my father,
and my mother was a king of sister, in thrall
to three fathers - mine, and hers,
and Our Heavenly. What she took from me
she needed, and much of what I had
I had of her gift. And it was as if I had
known her from long before, from any
town square, back to near
our beginning, as if, in her, I met
every woman burned with ruis,
coll, uath, saille, duir,
beth, fearn, nion - elder,
hazel, hawthorn, willow, oak,
alder, ash. When I look back,
I see her in woods, woods in flower,
although when I knew her she was doing her time
in the live grave, she ate what she could,
coloratura lips pursed
around some smaller spirit,
but if I sing, I sing from her.
First I would hear the note struck
on the piano, then her voice, scooping up toward it,
Druid mother I would hold not in my boughs and she pour
forth a newborn's caroling.
my mother slowly off, I lay there
taking my first breaths, as if
the air of he room was blowing me
like a bubble. All I had to do
was go out along the line of my gaze and back,
out and back, on gravity's silk, the
pressure of the air a caress, smelling on my
self her creamy blood. The air
was softly touching my skin and tongue,
entering me and drawing forth the little
sighs I did not know as mine.
I was not afraid. I lay in the quiet
and looked, and did the wordless thought,
my mind was getting its oxygen
direct, the rich mix by mouth.
I hated no one. I gazed and gazed,
and everything was interesting, I was
free, not yet in love, I did not
belong to anyone, I had drunk
no milk, yet - no one had
my heart. I was not very human. I did not
know there was anyone else. I lay
like a god, for an hour, then they came for me,
and took me to my mother.
- First Hour, pg. 7
* * *
The day my class was to go to the circus,
I sidled into the bathroom, early,
and stood on tiptoe, up into the bottom
corner of the mirror, and leaned on the sink,
and slowly cut off my eyelashes
down close to the eyelid. I had no idea what I was
doing, or why, I studied the effect
- not bad, a little stark - but when I saw the effect
on my mother, not just anger, but pity
and horror, I was interested.
I think I had almost given up on being
a girl, on trying to grow up to be a woman like my mother,
I wanted to get disadopted
and go home to be the baby with the calf's head,
home to my birth mother the bearded lady,
my father the sword swallower stopped mid-swallow,
one with the sword. I had tried to act normal,
but when the inspiration came
I felt I was meant to act on it,
to look at my mom with my gaze trimmed to a seer's
and see her see me for an instant, see
her irises contact. I did not
imagine I could ever leave my mother,
mostly I was her, in distorted form,
but at least for that second the itsy scissors
spoke to her with their birdy beak,
skreeek, skreeek, witch whinge. And when
my lashes grew back, no thicker no thinner no
shorter no longer, my mother sat me
down, and taught me to bat them, to look
sidelong, blindly, and shudder them at seven beats a second.
- 5¢ a Peek, pg. 13
* * *
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. 23
* * *
When I swung the lever over, and the curtain
slammed shut, and I looked up,
there it was, an oval sticker
like a flat cocoon spun above the levers,
as if I were not the only living
thing in there. For a moment, I felt I could
almost understand following
the leader of the embryo,
its huge, unvarious head, its messy
beauty, the meteor-tail of its body,
its rushing in place, I could almost take it
for my god. But to make
others take it -
to sacrifice them to it - it looked archaic,
its markings those of a Pandora sphinx
or a death's-head moth. As I glanced from candidate to
candidate, in my side-gaze the foetus
looked like an eye with an uneven iris,
and its gaze seemed to be following me -
alone in the booth, the way a woman
is supposed to be alone with her body.
She doesn't have to give it to anyone anymore,
not even a child of her own conceiving.
A man has gone up the road of the air
and walked on the moon. A woman has gone
up the passage of her body to the rosy
attic of the womb, with her whisk broom,
weeping on singing - or larvum, no intricate
orb-web, no chrystalis
bu she decides.
- The Foetus in the Voting Booth, pg. 35
* * *
It's curious and sweet to slip it out
and look inside, to see what's there,
like a treasure hunt, small toys
and dolls tucked into the root-floor of the woods,
or tilt up a stone in the yard and find,
in the groove of her path, the flame-brown newt. Now I
read the shallow cup of dregs,
shreds like clothes torn away in
eagerness - cloth of the bodies - which rips
to a cloud of threads. Here our daughter
never picked her finicky way,
here our son never somersaulted,
here only our not-children
advanced, and dropped, and surged forward
and were cut down, there a coil
of tail, here a ladyfinger, a
curl, a bone of the twin. When I have reached
into myself, and glistened out the dome,
I search its planetarium sky
for its weather, ivory nimbus, reach
of summer showers - these are the heavens
under which the grateful bodies
went to earth, dense with contentment,
moving, together, for those hour-long
moments, in a mattery paradise,
I gaze into the cumulus
of spermicide, I bless the lollers who
stay in that other sphere as we come
like surf on the shore of it.
- Diaphragm Aria, pg. 44
* * *
All day I had a feeling I had met someone
- someone I had wanted to meet, and been
afraid to meet, someone important, maybe
foreign, or someone I had thought dead
and then seen alive. The night before,
I had seen Jesus's bearded face
on the ceiling, within the curves of plaster
vine-coil, as if I were looking at
some modest, washed area of land
or water, or the first, clean clay -
as if I were seeing the blankness of a good
human, the desirelessness
of a grown-up parent, bu it was not that...
Whom had I found who had been lost to me? I
could not think - and then, I remembered
the round, plump, woven-silver
mirror, which I had held, this bright
morning, between my legs, I had seen,
for the first time, myself, face to feral face.
- The Stranger, pg. 56
* * *
To end up in an old hotel suite
with one's nearly-grown children, who are sleeping, is a kind
of Eden. The one in the second bed
rests her head on two pillows - I did not know that -
as she sleeps. The one on the couch, under candlewick
chenille, has here and there as he turns
the stuffed animal his sister just gave him
for his twentieth birthday. I roam in the half-
dark, getting ready for bed, I stalk
my happiness. I'm like someone from the past
allowed to come back, I am with our darlings,
they are dreaming, safe. Perhaps it's especially like
Eden since this is my native coast,
it smells something like my earliest life,
fog, plumeria, eucalyptus, it is
broken, the killership of my family -
it is stopped within me, the complex gear
that translated its motion. When I turn out the light and lie
down, I feel as if I'm at the apex
of a triangle, and then, with a Copernican
swerve, I feel that the apex is my daughter,
and then my son, I am that background figure, that
source figure the mother. We are not,
strictly speaking, mortal. We cast
beloveds into the future. I fall
asleep, briefly living forever
in the room with our son and daughter.
- Sleep Suite, pg. 67
* * *
When our daughter said Mom, in a low voice,
some background music in the restaurant,
almost too low to hear, was doing
glottal-stop riffs. Her throaty, intense
call was like the one she uses
to draw my notice to a baby. She moved
her eyes to one side, signaling me
to look, over her shoulder, at a table
where the mouth of an oldish man was moving
together with the bass-amp sounds - they were
his voice. Our daughter's eyes opened
wide, a half-second, showing ecstatic
eyeball around the iris, and the back of my
scalp relaxed, swallowing his tones
like a portion of sleep, such low notes,
reminding my spin of its ancestry
inside the earth, as if I were sinking
down through shale, slate, bedrock,
feldspar, gypsum, serpentine,
iron, descending through older and older
strata, Cambrian, Precambrian,
back before we remember, to a time
it was not possible for an elder to harm a younger.
- Earth Aria, pg. 71
* * *
In the medicine aisle, I saw the headline,
the father lost, and was the murder of the father
connected to the son. I kneeled down.
To believe his father might have died because of
him? The door to where he'd come from shut
behind him - almost as if it were better
he had not been born? I felt a furnace
in my lings, as if for him. Now,
would his gift die, how could he sly through the
air among the others, slipping between them like the
freest being on earth? Because
I have felt I have harmed my family, I half believe it,
all day I prayed that from second to second
he could bear to breathe. What did I know,
what did I know. Toward evening, I saw that I had
never understood what he faced, I had
thought he was complete, like a seraph, as if
nothing could get hold of him, no
hope to go beyond the pale, far
gone in power, beyond reach,
out of mortal range - unlike
a young man on a vision quest,
who goes, in hunger and thirst, when adulthood
approaches, out onto the plain where his father
went before him, and his father's father,
and his father's father's father, and his father's
father's father's father's father's father.
- The Headline, pg. 88
* * *
Whatever she was to me, she was
the human caught in something she could hardly
bear, she was like a flying keening
being, limed and jessed, a small
soprano of the trees, of ngetal and luis,
reed and quickbeam. No one said
I had come from inside her, yet from where else but that
green music, and at birth I had stepped
somehow back, out of the laurel into
which I had rushed away from my father,
and my mother was a king of sister, in thrall
to three fathers - mine, and hers,
and Our Heavenly. What she took from me
she needed, and much of what I had
I had of her gift. And it was as if I had
known her from long before, from any
town square, back to near
our beginning, as if, in her, I met
every woman burned with ruis,
coll, uath, saille, duir,
beth, fearn, nion - elder,
hazel, hawthorn, willow, oak,
alder, ash. When I look back,
I see her in woods, woods in flower,
although when I knew her she was doing her time
in the live grave, she ate what she could,
coloratura lips pursed
around some smaller spirit,
but if I sing, I sing from her.
First I would hear the note struck
on the piano, then her voice, scooping up toward it,
Druid mother I would hold not in my boughs and she pour
forth a newborn's caroling.
- Mother, pg. 101
May 1, 2021
you can't read poetry books the way you would fiction where you sit down and consume as much as you please in one sitting. you are required to take only a few in an hour, or by routine like almond chocolates after every dinner. reading a lot of poems at once would betray both the ones you just finished and those you are about to. at least that's how i see it.
#TheUnsweptRoom reminded me again that poems are felt best when read orally. some pieces only made sense when i had to pronounce them. some melodic treads and leaps are only fully recognized once uttered. the purpose of every poem in this book is clear, the overall experience is comparable to, as the title suggests, entering a room where the objects strewn in bed and across the floor have been untouched for years, each one carrying a particular joy or pain in reminiscing.
a lot of them are about motherhood, raising children, and sexual intimacy, all explored from a womanly POV, but that's not saying they are gentle and unaggressive. some pieces felt like the small yet precisely sharp pinch your mother would warn you with when you misbehave in public as a kid.
these poems are best read on afternoons and early mornings. i have read just one #SharonOlds poem before this and im so glad i checked out more of her work. this was a pleasant reading experience, you can tell she wants to make the reader feel what she went through personally, as deliberate and lovingly as she could.
#TheUnsweptRoom reminded me again that poems are felt best when read orally. some pieces only made sense when i had to pronounce them. some melodic treads and leaps are only fully recognized once uttered. the purpose of every poem in this book is clear, the overall experience is comparable to, as the title suggests, entering a room where the objects strewn in bed and across the floor have been untouched for years, each one carrying a particular joy or pain in reminiscing.
a lot of them are about motherhood, raising children, and sexual intimacy, all explored from a womanly POV, but that's not saying they are gentle and unaggressive. some pieces felt like the small yet precisely sharp pinch your mother would warn you with when you misbehave in public as a kid.
these poems are best read on afternoons and early mornings. i have read just one #SharonOlds poem before this and im so glad i checked out more of her work. this was a pleasant reading experience, you can tell she wants to make the reader feel what she went through personally, as deliberate and lovingly as she could.
October 22, 2016
These are poems of matter; the matter of the physical, sensual universe and the matter of being a woman, a daughter, a wife, a mother, a poet with one of the most embodied and delicious imaginations in American letters. It's an imagination tied always to the real, the actual, yet willing to be playful, exploratory. Olds is so enamored of the sound and sense of words that her lines reverberate, pun intended, with such richness that every poem is like the finest chocolate, the rarest glass of wine (see her Pulitzer-winning Stag's Leap). While many of these poems do inhabit the terrain for which she is best known (i.e., the domestic, the familial), there are also stunning poems about race and religion, and a very fine one about a snake.
May 31, 2017
Don't get me wrong there are some EXQUISITE poems in this collection, particularly "5c a Peek" and "The Given," but sometimes the poems began to feel redundant like I was reading another version of one I'd just read a few pages back. I love the way Sharon Olds handles sex, particularly orgasms, and her tender yet honest attention to writing about her family (her children, her husband, her parents). I also thoroughly appreciated her portraits in regard to aging. In one of the last workshops I taught the subject of writing the experience of elders arose and it felt serendipitous that I then read The Unswept Room. But perhaps it's just an indication that I am growing older as I near my forty-first birthday.
March 1, 2009
Strong, swift, bold, and vulnerable - this collection stings real like stepping from a hot shower into a breezy room. Memory blurred with coping, accepting, and healing in the present moment meets loving openly in the face of emotional closures. Sharon Olds writes with middle-aged maturity mixed with youthful optimism and starry-eyed yet sober indulgence in all things body, heart, and mind.
July 18, 2014
Full of emotion. Delightful.
June 8, 2015
Absolute perfection
September 15, 2020
Es un libro muy bello, ella es muy dulce. Desborda emociones y sentimientos.
November 12, 2021
Sharon Olds profunda e impecable como siempre. "5 centavos el vistazo" y "Un tiempo de pasión" se me grabaron en la retina.
December 25, 2023
I got to know Olds through Glück. Having read more on Olds, now I can see why the two authors constantly draw on one another's work. Both rely on the autobiographicality of poetry: Glück's poetry is situated in a realm rooted in what we typically assert to that is also heavily accompanied with the preoccupation of the beyond, Olds' holds her ground where her humanly senses still perceive, on earth, no limbo, no ambiguous place elaborated mythologically; here in her postpartum bedroom, here in her grandfather's living room, here on a phone call with her daughter. While both cling on the present, with the past inspiring it, they treat words like masses, with so much burden; how language is (at least to me).
December 15, 2023
I'm all over and out of order in terms of how I've read Sharon Olds' collections, but this one is my favorite so far in my personal journey. She was 60 when these were published, but many of the poems seem to be about an earlier period in her life. I think I am at an age where I can see through to the perspective she writes from as mother, daughter, partner.
Her voice is accessible, but meticulous and beautiful. Elegant, just right phrases, unafraid to be raw, visceral, or sensual. This is an excellent collection.
Her voice is accessible, but meticulous and beautiful. Elegant, just right phrases, unafraid to be raw, visceral, or sensual. This is an excellent collection.
June 30, 2024
Ahhhh poetry…not my favorite genre, but this little book was quite outstanding! Sharon Olds creates a collection of poetry (which seems autobiographical) with themes of love, aging, nature, sex and sensuality, children and family - her writing is so beautiful!
She is a wordsmith for sure. One of my favorite qualities of her writing is her use of juxtaposition. Just when you think you know where it’s headed, the opposite occurs. Beautiful!
She is a wordsmith for sure. One of my favorite qualities of her writing is her use of juxtaposition. Just when you think you know where it’s headed, the opposite occurs. Beautiful!
May 10, 2017
Masterful, powerful, and something I've never seen in poetry before.
I made the "mistake" of reading Stag's Leap first. That meant I came to this volume knowing what was to come for the narrator, and that meant a lot of tears. The ache these poems leave in my heart makes me want to keep reading them until it heals.
I made the "mistake" of reading Stag's Leap first. That meant I came to this volume knowing what was to come for the narrator, and that meant a lot of tears. The ache these poems leave in my heart makes me want to keep reading them until it heals.
April 12, 2019
I had the chance to meet her translator into Spanish, Inés Garland, who spoke so passionately about the book, that it made me read it. I believe poetry is subjective, so as much as I can appreciate her writing, I have to say it's not for me. She writes about things I can't and never will be able to relate, about marriage and motherhood but I guess that's what reading is for, isn't it? To read about other people's experiences and learn through them.
November 21, 2021
Every word is carefully chosen. And it is beautiful. But it didn’t resonate with me like I’m sure it will with other women. It seems to me that Olds’ particular target audience with this collect of poems is women in their 40s to 50s looking back on early life, maturity, raising a family, and watching that family grow. Beautifully written but uninspiring to me.
September 13, 2023
These poems are sensual, full of sex and emotion.
Her relationship with her mother seems quite complex.
It's heartbreaking to juxtapose "The Older" (about feeling beautiful as she ages based on how her husband sees her) with "Past Future Imperfect" and "Psalm" (which foreshadow the end of her marriage).
Her relationship with her mother seems quite complex.
It's heartbreaking to juxtapose "The Older" (about feeling beautiful as she ages based on how her husband sees her) with "Past Future Imperfect" and "Psalm" (which foreshadow the end of her marriage).
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