Blood, Tin, Straw

by Sharon Olds

WINNER OF THE PATERSON POETRY PRIZE • A transcendent collection of poems about the ecstatic and brutal side of a woman’s experience—from 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 ).

"She has written without embarrassment or apology, with remarkable passion and savagery and nerve, poems about family and family pathology, early erotic fascination, and sexual life inside marriage."—Amy Hempel

Sharon Olds divides this new book into five sections—"Blood," "Tin," "Straw," "Fire," and "Light"—each made up of fourteen poems whose dominant imagery is drawn from one of these elements. The poems are rooted in different moments of an ordinary life and weave back and forth in time. Each section suggests the progression of the making of a soul cleansed by blood, forged by fire, suffused by light. Sharon Olds transforms her subjects with an alchemist's art, using language that is alternately casual and startling, fierce and transcendent.

This is an intensely moving collection by one of our finest poets.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary

125 pages, Paperback

First published October 5, 1999

About the author

Born in San Francisco on November 19, 1942, Sharon Olds earned a B.A. at Stanford University and a Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds's following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Her other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

About Olds's poetry, one reviewer for the New York Times said, "Her work has a robust sensuality, a delight in the physical that is almost Whitmanesque. She has made the minutiae of a woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have preoccupied other poets."

Olds's numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in more than a hundred collections.

Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Crystal · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe that I bought this book a couple of years after it came out in 1999. That would be around 10 years ago and I remember reading a bit of it and thinking that Sharon Olds was an amazing poet. These years later I chose to reread the entire book and I think I've changed. Olds is a good poet.... in this collection. After rereading Blood, Tin, Straw I feel she must have been going through a phase, these poem are earthy, gritty, and very sexual. Maybe I was going through a phase as well because there were many I loved. I was at a different place in my life. Today, I still have a few favorites but I also feel that poetry should not be mysterious and confusing and, in my opinion, if the average reader is confused about what she is trying to convey then maybe it's not a great poem. I will also say that I haven't read many other poems written by Olds so I might be making an unfair comparison.

My favorites in this collections include The Remedy about milk and honey and the sensuality shared between husband and wife; My Father's Diary, At the Bay, The Native and The Knowing. These are enough for the book to remain in my poetry collection.

[Rick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing collection from Olds. There is something close to perfunctory in these poems. Olds made her reputation with frank poems about lust, love, and family that unearthed the mythic drama in these domestic details. Here, even when she is writing about intimacies with her expected frankness there doesn’t seem much motivation or inspiration behind them. The language is pedestrian, the telling prosaic.

[Michelle Hoogterp · Rating 1 out of 5]

Grotesquely sexual.

[Schuyler · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some really shining lines in this collection, and I enjoyed maybe five or six poems in there entirety. But as a whole, it didn't hold up for me. She tended to see-saw in and out of a narrative voice from poem to poem, and sometimes even within a poem and that tended to distract me and give me an overall sense of disconnection. But maybe I shouldn't be reviewing it as whole, maybe for poetry that isn't fair, since each poem should/can stand alone. My grasp on poetry is still fairly instinctual and I base most of my reaction towards poetry as to whether or not it makes me feel anything. I regretfully don't take the time and energy to examine whatever sub-text may exist with each poem, so in that regard maybe my reviews/opinions of poetry should be dismissed, assuming that authentic criticism comes from an authentic examination/reading. I will say that it was pretty cool when Sharon Olds rejected Laura Bush's invitation to have dinner at the White House. I'm sure the First Lady cried herself to sleep that night, or at least had her assistant cry herself to sleep on Laura's behalf.

"So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it."

-Excerpt from letter. copyright 2005.-

Sharon, you've got ice in your veins. Cold, cold ice.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another solid, sometimes sensational collection from Olds. While I sometimes wrestle with her weird adjective choices (From First Thanksgiving: "my old, soupy chest"???), there are just too many moments of brilliance to bicker about the few lines that fall flat. A couple of new favorites for me here are The Babysitter (A woman yearns for the baby that she's caring for to nurse her--"Suck, goddamnit, I thought, I wanted to feel the tug of another life, I wanted to feel needed,") and After the Rape In Our Building (A couple make love after hearing a woman was raped in their building the night before--"and later he took off the condom...he dropped it into an envelope so the kids wouldn't see it, and dropped the envelope into a wastebasket,"). Can't wait to keep reading more of this woman's work.

[Jolene · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been making my way through Sharon Olds's collections: The Wellspring, published in 1996, The Unswept Room, published in 2002, Stag's Leap -- my favorite and everyone's favorite, published in 2012 --, Balladz in 2022, and now Blood, Tin, Straw, published in 1999. Because of Stag's Leap, I can never stop myself from placing Olds's work in the context of her divorce. Most of these poems must have been written both before she knew her husband was leaving her, and they very much center on sex: honey on nipples, "my sperm king," a passing woman's boobs... There will be two poems about sex and then a poem about menstruation and then another about sex. Three sex poems and then suddenly a poem about her dad. A sweet memory about her son followed by a poem that uses the word "c*nt." In "Warrior: 5th Grade" (76), she remembers a fight she got in in elementary school and then shifts, suddenly, in the last line to talking about aggressive sex.

Olds is all over the place here but usually lands where she seems to be most comfortable: somewhere in the intersection of sex and birth and death. The final poem is about knowing her husband: "I am so lucky that I can know him. / This is the only way to know him. / I am the only one who knows him. / When I wake again, he is looking at me, / as if he is eternal" (125). Olds is no longer the only one to know him, but her work has made him -- made them -- eternal.

Here are a few that I want to remember:

"When It Comes" (14)
Sometimes,
when I watch the delicate show,
like watching snow, or falling stars,
I think of men, what it could seem to them
that we see the blood pour slowly from our sex,
as if the earth sighed, slightly,
and we felt it, and saw it,
as if life moaned a little, in wonder, and we were it.

"Coming of Age, 1966" (88)
And every time
I tried to write of the body's gifts,
the child with her clothes burned off by napalm
ran into the poem screaming. I was
a Wasp child of the suburbs, I felt
cheated by Lyndon Johnson, robbed of my
entrance into the erotic, my birthright
of ease and pleasure. I understood almost
nothing of the world, but I knew that I was
connected to the girl running, her arms
out to the sides, like a plucked heron, I was
responsible for her, and helpless to reach her,
like the man on the sidewalk, his arms up
around his head, and all I did
was memorize Latin, and make love, and sometimes
march, my heart aching with righteousness.

"The Protester" (105)
That was when I'd come to
know I loved the land of my birth --
when the men had to leave, they could never come back,
I looked and loved every American
needle on every American tree, I thought
my soul was in it. But if I were taken and
used, taken and used, I think
my soul would die, I think I'd be easily broken,
the work of my life over. And you'd said
This is the work of my life, to say,
with my body itself, You fuckers you cannot
tell me who to kill.

And I'm OBSESSED with "The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb" (115) about how she needs to accept that her son is moving into the world without her. I want to remember it for when my friends' children grow up:
Whatever he needs, he has or doesn't
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have
he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a heavy wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now.
Whatever his arrogance can do
it is doing to him. Everything
that's been been placed in him
will come out, now, the contents of a trunk
unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.

[Remy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Never have I come across so many microscopic observations about the body and specific terms/names for things as little as a brain cell. There are some real nice gems though.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes Sharon is right there and sometimes I want to say, "Oh come on now."
She really has the ability to get under the reader's skin. 1954 is a stunning piece of work because it is about something outside of the experience of the writer and she brings you right there to that horrible crime through her experience. I didn't learn anything from some of her poems, such as Sometimes, which was very personal. Same with Ssshh. I loved The Defense, which was personal but so much more than that for so many women. She has a wonderful accessibility coupled with so much talent.

[Rebecca]

I'm conflicted about this poet, which is why the book has no rating, although I disliked most of it. I like Olds' form and phrasing. But I abhor about 98% of her subject matter and sentiment, which is somewhat tired and trite. Or at least it wildly diverges from how I feel about femininity, and it's rooted in a sexual perspective that's older than my mother.

However...if I come across more of her poems that somehow manage NOT to incorporate her cervix, I'd read them.

[Elaine Corden]

So many sex poems.

[Megan Alyse · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mean . Hashtag poetry porn. Sexy as hell.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I could change one physical thing
about myself, I would retract those tiny
twilit lips which appeared at the mouth
of my body when the children's heads pressed out, I would
haul back up into heaven those little
ladder-tatters, although in the crush
between the babies' skill-plates and the skin
of the birth-gates, we want the symphysis
more cherished - and he seems to like those bruised
celestial wattles, their clasp, their tip-of-
seraph-pinion purple. They are
the last licks that the other world took,
crown to sole, along each darling,
he kisses a go'd small tongues in them
and they soul-kiss him back. I think he could
make peace with a scar, if my breast were to be
cut out to save me, honour his way
along that seam, I think he could love me
if I had no body - did he love me before
he knew me, before I was born? Maybe
his love drew me to earth, my head
moved toward the surface of my mother's body
and the minuscule hands of her labia
midwived me out, I came toward him in her ribbons, through her favours.

- The Gift, pg. 5

* * *

I saw my father naked, once, I
opened the blue bathroom's door
which he always locked - if it opened, it was empty -
and there, surrounded by glistening turquoise
tile, sitting on the toilet, was my father,
all of him, and all of him
was skin. In an instant, my gaze ran
in a single swerving, unimpended
swoop, up: toe, ankle,
knee, hip, rib, nape,
shoulder, elbow, wrist, knuckle,
my father. He looked so unprotected,
so seamless, and shy, like a girl on a toilet,
and even though I knew he was sitting
to shit, there was no shame in that
but even a human peace. He looked up,
I said Sorry, backed out, shut the door
but I'd seen him, my father's shorn lamb,
my father a cloud in the blue sky
of the blue bathroom, my eye had driven
up the hairpin mountain road of the
naked male, I had turned a corner
and found his flank unguarded - gentle
bulge of the hip-joint, border of the pelvic cradle.

- Once, pg. 21

* * *

The earth is a homeless person. Or
the earth's home is the atmosphere.
Or the atmosphere is the earth's clothing,
layers of it, the earth wears all of it,
the earth is a homeless person.
Or the atmosphere is the earth's cocoon,
which it spun itself, the earth is a larvum.
Or the atmosphere is the earth's skin -
earth, and atmosphere, one
homeless one. Or its orbit is the earth's
home, or the path of the orbit just
a path, the earth a homeless person.
Or the gutter of the earth's orbit is a circle
of hell, the circle of the homeless. But the earth
has a place, around the fire, the hearth
of our star, the earth is at home, the earth
is home to the homeless. For food, and warmth,
and shelter, and health, they have earth and fire
and air and water, for home they have
the elements they are made of, as if
each homeless one were an earth, made
of milk and grain, like Ceres, and one
could eat oneself - as if the human
were a god, who could eat the earth, a god
of homelessness.

- What Is the Earth?, pg. 47

* * *

When I pass an abandoned, half-wrecked building,
on a waste-lot, in winter, the smell of the cold
rot decides me - I am not going
to rot. I will not lie down in the ground
with the cauliflower and the eggshell mushroom,
and grow a fungus out of my stomach
steady as a foetus, my face sluicing off me,
my Calvinist lips blooming little
broccolis, my hair growing,
my nails growing into curls of horn, so there is
always movement in my grave. If the worm
were God, let it lope, slowly, through my flesh, if its
loping were music. But I was near, when ferment
moved, in its swerving tunnels, through my father,
nightly, I have had it with that,
I am going to burn, I am going to pour my
body out as fire, as fierce
pain not felt I am leaving. The hair
will fizzle around my roasting scalp, with a
head of garlic in my pocket I am going out.
And I know what happens in the fire closet,
when the elbow tendons shrink in the head, and I
want it to happen - I want, dead, to
pull up my hands in fists, I want
to go out as a pugilist.

- By Fire, pg. 75

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sharon Olds can be mesmerizing in how she uses her poetry to go to any depth in her reflections on family, marriage, intimacy, and love. She gives us poems about her dysfunctional upbringing and the abuse she endured in her youth and the resistance she put up. She can seemingly turn any instant or experience from her life into a gripping narrative poem—for example, a time when she observed a verbally abusive father and she tried to step in with a word of support for the child and was rebuffed. She engages with a great need to reflect upon her youth and how her rebellious nature made her think she was a problem. This volume also includes a few homage poems, such as one for the teacher astronaut Christa McAuliffe who perished on the space shuttle Challenger.

[Maya · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I came away with the skin of the other / world on my palms, and at night, when I touch him, / wander on him, hold to him, and move / on and hold to him, I feel I am home again"

Sharon Olds' collection of poetry Blood, Tin, Straw is a brutally honest and powerful piece of work. Olds is not afraid to express her deepest, and sometimes darkest, feelings. Her poetry is often times shocking, yet she writes with true grace and elegance. Her slower poems are soft and written with the most beautiful of words. Truly she is a master of her craft for her diversity in writing.
She definitely is not a poet to read as a beginner, as like I said, she is quite jarring at times. I do find her work essential to read eventually. Much can be learned from her style of writing.

[Sarah W · Rating 3 out of 5]

Olds is one of my very favorite poets. I absolutely love The Gold Cell, and really liked The Father, and The Stag’s Leap was good. This collection was my least favorite and just lost my interest at times. While a good number of the poems had the magic I attribute to Olds, overall I don’t plan to return to the collection too often. It became a bit repetitive and sort of felt like Olds was performing Olds in places rather than getting to that wild, embryonic magic I’ve experienced so often with her work.

(Also, light-hearted note: a drinking game for this book would be to take a drink every time a genital or the word “sex” is used.)

[Sophia L · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only reason I dock this book 1 star is because the length of it and the repetition of the poems turns quickly from a brilliant beam of light to being scorched by the sun. It’s too intense for one mortal!

But overall this book is undeniably lovely. I felt like I had entered the caul of Sharon’s womb and was drowning in the love she had for fucking her lover-husband the entire time. If I could know only 1 watt of that desire I could die today.

[Zarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is my first time reading Olds. Considering how often I heard her name come up before picking this book up, I was pretty disappointed.
The words and lines themselves seemed to be lacking. I found most poems to fall clunky on my tongue. I'm fine with frankness in poetry, but I just didn't find this collection that good.
I will say, the few poems I did mark as ones I liked, I liked enough that I would pick up another collection by Olds.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

I think reading as much sharon olds as possible is Probably the best advice if yr interested in writing any poesie. again she's somewhere miraculous, Blood, Tin, Straw may not be her most consistent collection but it's up there. she's more soliloquys here than usual. it took until around the halfway mark for poem after poem to slam, especially fond of '19', 'Outdoor Shower', 'The Bed' ... more soon

[federico garcía LOCA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorites include: The Necklace, the Sound, the Burned Diary, Coming of Age, the Falls, the Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb (familiar, once shown to me a decade ago by my own mother?)

To read Sharon Old is to think about your parents. And I can just picture her there… walking on Telegraph just leaving Willard Elementary… one of the Bay’s best!

[chloe lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

raw and beautiful and erotic and soul crushing and invigorating and inspiring and pure Art in its pure Art form and pure Art spirit and its pure Art life because it’s alive it’s living it is a living piece of Art of Soul and Body. speechless i am utterly speechless and so full— so stuffed to the brim of these richly seasoned words. well fed. beautiful read.

[Alex Watson]

Erotic, reaching towards taboo, the honesty about the body and the way thoughts of sex get tangled up with daily memories and images, will not be forgetting “The Gift” anytime soon. Kinda honestly sad to read after reading Stag’s Leap about her divorce years later because in this one you can tell the speaker is absolutely head over heels for her husband.

[Aimée Medina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read and devour all the Sharon Olds work you can get your hands on, her words jump off the page. She is known for the revenge poetry after her husband of many years divorced her suddenly but other works are just as compelling. She writes honestly about her parents, children, other relationships.

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poem was "First, Thanksgiving." I love this poet, though I found this collection to revolve mostly around a subject that I don't particularly like reading about: sex. Not erotica, but homages to sexual pleasures, to which I grew weary (especially after 120 pages of it).

[Beaumont · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was fine. A lot of the poems seemed a bit samey to me. Like 3/4 of them were about having sex with a guy, even when that didn’t make a ton of sense in the overall poem. It felt kind of like an ok song on repeat. Some poems were very nice. I’m not sure if read it again, but it was fine.

[neely · Rating 4 out of 5]

3/5 stars. Some poems really shine and others falter to a wordy and overly complex extent. Overall a good piece of work, but it reads a bit roughly at times when it comes to structure and word choice.

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sharon Olds’ Blood, Tinder, Straw largely takes up the same sexual obsessions of her previous volume, The Wellspring but this time with a marked injection of poetic language—stiffer rhythms played against still starker rhymes, neologisms, refrain, etc. etc.

[Byron · Rating 5 out of 5]

So. Damn. Good.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite poems include “The Other Kingdom,” “The Summer Day,” “The Talkers,” “Sometimes,” “The Knowing.”

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some amazing stuff in here but I also felt like it could have been a third shorter.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are poems in this collection that are truly spectacular; unfortunately, many of the rest of the poems faded into sameness for me.