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Stag's Leap: Poems
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • From one of today's best poets—a stunningly poignant sequence of poems that tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.
In this wise and intimate telling—which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending—Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and who now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable “Stag’s Leap,” “When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.” Olds’s propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music—sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.
In this wise and intimate telling—which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending—Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and who now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable “Stag’s Leap,” “When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.” Olds’s propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music—sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.
112 pages, Paperback
First published September 4, 2012
About the author
Sharon Olds
76 books724 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 588 reviews
January 28, 2024
After 30 years of marriage, Sharon Olds's husband announced he had fallen in love with someone else, and he didn't want to be married anymore. Well, at least not to her.
And Sharon was not only still in love with her husband; she didn't see it coming at all. And, man oh man, was she enamored with this man.
I mean. . . I think I have a decent capacity to love, but this woman was either obsessed with her spouse or she's some sort of Superhero of love. After 30 years of being married, she was pretty much still using her tongue to scoop the belly button lint out of his navel and then holding it reverently in her mouth before swallowing it.
Okay, so there's a quality to Ms. Olds's poetry that reminds me of both Mary Oliver's and Margaret Atwood's. Meaning: excellent writing that is often devastatingly beautifully, and sometimes just flat-out weird.
For example:
Sometimes now, I think of the back
of his head as a physiognomy,
blunt, rich as if with facial hair,
the convex stonewall shapes of the skull
like brow nose cheeks, as hard to read
as surfaces of the earth. He was as
mysterious to me as that phrenology--
occiput, lambdoid—but known like a home
outcrop of rock
Oh, come on now. . . occiput? Lambdoid? It's hard enough for poets to find people who will read their poetry; they don't need to make them run for their dictionaries, too.
But, when Ms. Olds abandons the weird, scientific analogies and whatnot and is authentic, it's a beautiful thing.
In her poem, Known to be Left, which was written not long after her husband left her, she writes:
If I pass a mirror, I turn away,
I do not want to look. . .
I am so ashamed
before my friends—to be known to be left
by the one who supposedly knew me best,
each hour is a room of shame, and I am
swimming, swimming, holding my head up,
smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,
like being naked with the clothed, or being
a child, having to try to behave
while hating the terms of your life.
Wow. So much vulnerability and honesty here, in much of this collection.
And Sharon was not only still in love with her husband; she didn't see it coming at all. And, man oh man, was she enamored with this man.
I mean. . . I think I have a decent capacity to love, but this woman was either obsessed with her spouse or she's some sort of Superhero of love. After 30 years of being married, she was pretty much still using her tongue to scoop the belly button lint out of his navel and then holding it reverently in her mouth before swallowing it.
Okay, so there's a quality to Ms. Olds's poetry that reminds me of both Mary Oliver's and Margaret Atwood's. Meaning: excellent writing that is often devastatingly beautifully, and sometimes just flat-out weird.
For example:
Sometimes now, I think of the back
of his head as a physiognomy,
blunt, rich as if with facial hair,
the convex stonewall shapes of the skull
like brow nose cheeks, as hard to read
as surfaces of the earth. He was as
mysterious to me as that phrenology--
occiput, lambdoid—but known like a home
outcrop of rock
Oh, come on now. . . occiput? Lambdoid? It's hard enough for poets to find people who will read their poetry; they don't need to make them run for their dictionaries, too.
But, when Ms. Olds abandons the weird, scientific analogies and whatnot and is authentic, it's a beautiful thing.
In her poem, Known to be Left, which was written not long after her husband left her, she writes:
If I pass a mirror, I turn away,
I do not want to look. . .
I am so ashamed
before my friends—to be known to be left
by the one who supposedly knew me best,
each hour is a room of shame, and I am
swimming, swimming, holding my head up,
smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,
like being naked with the clothed, or being
a child, having to try to behave
while hating the terms of your life.
Wow. So much vulnerability and honesty here, in much of this collection.
February 14, 2024
The summit of contemporary verse, unfortunately
Contemporary American poetry arose a half century ago out of the confluence of a number of social and literary trends. The first was the rise of the confessional school of poets, associated especially with Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman: poets who attempted to make poems out of their lives, frankly using their most intimate real life experiences as subject matter. At the same time, poetry rather suddenly went from being something which ordinary people at least occasionally would read – many old enough will remember a time when the typical household had at least a few poetry books around, even if they were old chestnuts like The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and The Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley – to something which virtually no one except poets, critics, and a few college students paid any attention to. Both as cause and effect of this disregard, poets quickly moved into the ivory tower, with the great majority of persons claiming the title poet actually making their living as academics. This migration of poets to the academy was simultaneous with the creative writing movement, in which professors believed any student could be taught to be a poet by being inculcated with the movement’s trinity of principles – “Find Your Voice,” “Show, Don’t Tell,” and “Write What You Know,” and mastering a toolkit of specialized literary devices.
One of the most pernicious effects of these developments was the evolution of confessional poetry into poetry as therapy. Those original confessionalists were fine poets, but their successors adopted the same frankness without the same talent, learning, or discipline. The idea seems to have been, “Hey, those people wrote with agonized honesty about the most intimate experiences of their own lives and the result was good poetry, so if I write with agonized honesty about the most intimate experiences of my own life, it will be good poetry, right?” Today it’s reached the point where the prevalent type of mainstream American poetry, almost the only one which is taken seriously any more, resembles a rambling transcript of what one might say to one’s therapist. It’s as if the only poetic persona now considered acceptable were that of St. Sebastian. And such deeply felt, courageously honest expression of course demands a moral exemption from criticism, literary or otherwise: this is my LIFE, this is my PAIN – how can you “not like it?”
It’s against this background that one needs to understand why Stag’s Leap has been greeted with near universal admiration. On its appearance, it was praised in terms gushing even for our notoriously adulatory poetry critics. Reviews from major magazines and literary web sites have described it as “moving,” “insightful,” “remarkable,” and “breathtaking.” Carol Ann Duffy, perhaps the most prominent current British poet, remarked on the “grace and gallantry” of a “world-class poet.”
Stag’s Leap immediately won the prestigious British T. S. Eliot poetry prize and now, more recently, the Pulitzer.
The book is indeed the summation of the creative writing poetry which has come to dominate contemporary verse– so it’s not surprising that it’s a summary of everything which is wrong, false, and disappointing about American poetry today. It’s a landmark in what has to be one of the dreariest, most uninspired, and least creative (surely there has never been a less creative literary movement than Creative Writing) periods of poetry in history.
The cliché starts with the subject matter: family dysfunction, specifically divorce. This is certainly a legitimate subject for literature, but it’s not a promising one – it’s been done so many times lately that any book that wants to do it again should really do it differently than any other book has. This book doesn’t. Cliché continues with the title, which like too many recent verse collections uses a coyly clever pun (Stag’s Leap – the favorite wine of a couple – of whom the husband is the stag who “leaps” free by divorce – get it?) to place a friendly arm over the reader’s shoulder: I’m smart enough to make the pun, and you’re smart enough to understand it, so off we go together!”
Opening the book, we find a series of poems each running, as most creative writing verse is supposed to, one or a little more than one standard poetry magazine page in length, divided, as so many creative writing poetry volumes nowadays are, into four or five high-level sections. On this solid basis of bromide is erected a superstructure of verse that chugs through a series of remarkably unappetizing vignettes of domestic discord.
As we read on, we find that tired old creative writing workshop gimmicks are rife. For instance, the contemporary obsession with line breaks becomes almost maniacal in such passages as:
I find this sort of thing as distracting and irritating as the sort of person? who in talking? to you puts a rising inflection? every few syllables? so it sounds? like they are always asking you questions?
As to the subject matter, the personal agonies of the speaker are, to be sure, presented with the painful honesty which is held nowadays to ensure poetic quality. I don’t believe it ever does, but to say anything disapproving about such sincere disclosures of anguish would leave me open to the accusation of not being a warm, caring human being, a charge which I would find so woundingly hurtful that I feel I have no choice but passively to allow emotional honesty to fulfill its role of forestalling criticism, and be silent. About the style of this verse, however, I feel no such reticence.
For a book so widely praised for its poetical accomplishment, the verse here at points actually seems startlingly sloppy, factually, stylistically, and even grammatically. For instance, grammatically:
This is simply bad English: you infer from; you imply by. The fact that these words are confused by many people doesn’t make the confusion sound any less inept and vulgar in a supposedly serious piece of literature. Or, factually:
No doubt the morning and the evening came, but we may be sure the planets did not orbit each other.
Another standard creative writing gimmick used here, one seen regularly in recent academic poetry, is the sprinkling of deliberately obscure words: “stallor, tomentose, surcingle, ligate, latchet, slub …” (this last, I’m afraid, being a term more likely to be familiar, to youthful readers at least, in its currency as an internet slang insult than in its formal meaning of a thick spot in yarn.) Another usage I had to blink at was:
Maybe there is more than one word wirra, but the only one I know is an old-fashioned Irish exclamation of woe which, while no doubt originally Irish, has for at least a century and a half been used in English almost exclusively in the popularized dialect of sentimental stereotyped Irish songs and novels, giving the word in English contexts an ineluctable connotation of “stage Irish:” to my ear, comparing tears to “a wirra of knives” sounds as bizarre as describing surprise as “a begorrah of eyebrows.” For some reason, though, several reviewers have quoted the phrase admiringly as an example of bold poetic creativity. Well, there’s no accounting for tastes.
There is of course nothing intrinsically wrong with a poet using an obscure word, but it’s a matter of why. So far as I can see, in these poems this eccentric diction rarely adds vividness to the images or depth to the connotations. But if a poem is going to send most of its readers off to the dictionary, it had better have a good reason for doing so. The only reason I can see for doing so in books like this is showing off: “See I’m a poet, so I’m using the FULL RESOURCES OF THE LANGUAGE!” (Professor, will these words be on the exam?)
More evidence of shallowness of technique is provided by the throwaway allusions scattered throughout the book. Literary allusions are supposed to give depth and resonance to a present work by invoking the light of tradition to cast multiple shadows from it. But the allusions in these poems seemed to me, like the obscure words, usually just there for the sake of show, or, like the punning title, to give the reader a chance to feel clever. They take the most famous bits of great works (presumably on the assumption that those are the only bits today's readers will know or remember) and simply paste them into the verse, without much attention being paid to whether the allusions really resonate in their context. For instance, in "Material Ode" (page 7, also may be viewable in the amazon preview), we have two allusions to the famous beginning lines of Vergil's Aeneid, "of arms and the man I sing," and one to the most famous lines penned by a woman novelist, Jane Eyre's, "Reader, I married him." But these quotes have only a vague relation to the situation in the poem: all right, the poem, like The Aeneid, sings of a man, but that's as far as it goes (except for a rather inept pun on "arms" as an embrace), and the poem, like the Jane Eyre quote, is about a marriage, but that's as far as that goes.
To give examples of how it could be done better, a poet who knew how to use allusion effectively could have brought in a different famous line from Vergil, copied later by Dante, "I recognize the tokens of the ancient flame," which would have connected the present situation with a classic story of an abandoned woman as well as setting up suggestions of working through a purgatorial emotional state, and maybe also ironically invoking an image of redemption through love. Or if such a poem wants to bring in a great woman novelist, the three syllables "badly done" would suggest to anyone familiar with Jane Austen's work a complex of reproach, regret, and emotional misstep which could resonate with the poem's situation. Such subtleties of allusion seem beyond this book. But given the current state of literacy in America, they would probably be beyond most of the book's audience too.
As another example of careless technique, consider the lines from “Years Later” (p. 85):
The problem here is that this statement is likely to be incomprehensible to anyone who hears it rather than reads it: is the creature somehow inside “knocks?” or inside the Latin word for night, “nox?” Relying on the capital letter to clarify a meaning (which is presumably “fortress”) which wouldn't come across orally is technically careless. (Though as a matter of fact even with the capital letter the phrase is a little confusing: the first time I read it, I thought the creature was in a bowl of gelatin.) This may seem like a small point, but false notes in poetry are as egregious as they are in music, at least they are if the poetry is seriously trying to be any good.
Should anyone object that my comments are harsh, my defense is to point out that the reputation of a book which has won the accolades mentioned above will hardly be impaired by the opinion of a nobody like myself. But though my opinion may not be significant, I, like everyone, have a right to it, and my opinion is that this is a bad book, and that the fact that it’s been received as such a good one is shocking and discouraging evidence of the abysmal state to which the professors have reduced both our poetry and our taste.
Contemporary American poetry arose a half century ago out of the confluence of a number of social and literary trends. The first was the rise of the confessional school of poets, associated especially with Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman: poets who attempted to make poems out of their lives, frankly using their most intimate real life experiences as subject matter. At the same time, poetry rather suddenly went from being something which ordinary people at least occasionally would read – many old enough will remember a time when the typical household had at least a few poetry books around, even if they were old chestnuts like The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and The Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley – to something which virtually no one except poets, critics, and a few college students paid any attention to. Both as cause and effect of this disregard, poets quickly moved into the ivory tower, with the great majority of persons claiming the title poet actually making their living as academics. This migration of poets to the academy was simultaneous with the creative writing movement, in which professors believed any student could be taught to be a poet by being inculcated with the movement’s trinity of principles – “Find Your Voice,” “Show, Don’t Tell,” and “Write What You Know,” and mastering a toolkit of specialized literary devices.
One of the most pernicious effects of these developments was the evolution of confessional poetry into poetry as therapy. Those original confessionalists were fine poets, but their successors adopted the same frankness without the same talent, learning, or discipline. The idea seems to have been, “Hey, those people wrote with agonized honesty about the most intimate experiences of their own lives and the result was good poetry, so if I write with agonized honesty about the most intimate experiences of my own life, it will be good poetry, right?” Today it’s reached the point where the prevalent type of mainstream American poetry, almost the only one which is taken seriously any more, resembles a rambling transcript of what one might say to one’s therapist. It’s as if the only poetic persona now considered acceptable were that of St. Sebastian. And such deeply felt, courageously honest expression of course demands a moral exemption from criticism, literary or otherwise: this is my LIFE, this is my PAIN – how can you “not like it?”
It’s against this background that one needs to understand why Stag’s Leap has been greeted with near universal admiration. On its appearance, it was praised in terms gushing even for our notoriously adulatory poetry critics. Reviews from major magazines and literary web sites have described it as “moving,” “insightful,” “remarkable,” and “breathtaking.” Carol Ann Duffy, perhaps the most prominent current British poet, remarked on the “grace and gallantry” of a “world-class poet.”
Stag’s Leap immediately won the prestigious British T. S. Eliot poetry prize and now, more recently, the Pulitzer.
The book is indeed the summation of the creative writing poetry which has come to dominate contemporary verse– so it’s not surprising that it’s a summary of everything which is wrong, false, and disappointing about American poetry today. It’s a landmark in what has to be one of the dreariest, most uninspired, and least creative (surely there has never been a less creative literary movement than Creative Writing) periods of poetry in history.
The cliché starts with the subject matter: family dysfunction, specifically divorce. This is certainly a legitimate subject for literature, but it’s not a promising one – it’s been done so many times lately that any book that wants to do it again should really do it differently than any other book has. This book doesn’t. Cliché continues with the title, which like too many recent verse collections uses a coyly clever pun (Stag’s Leap – the favorite wine of a couple – of whom the husband is the stag who “leaps” free by divorce – get it?) to place a friendly arm over the reader’s shoulder: I’m smart enough to make the pun, and you’re smart enough to understand it, so off we go together!”
Opening the book, we find a series of poems each running, as most creative writing verse is supposed to, one or a little more than one standard poetry magazine page in length, divided, as so many creative writing poetry volumes nowadays are, into four or five high-level sections. On this solid basis of bromide is erected a superstructure of verse that chugs through a series of remarkably unappetizing vignettes of domestic discord.
As we read on, we find that tired old creative writing workshop gimmicks are rife. For instance, the contemporary obsession with line breaks becomes almost maniacal in such passages as:
Now I come to look at love
in a new way, now that I know I’m not
standing in its light. I want to ask my
almost-no-longer husband what it’s like to not
love…
I find this sort of thing as distracting and irritating as the sort of person? who in talking? to you puts a rising inflection? every few syllables? so it sounds? like they are always asking you questions?
As to the subject matter, the personal agonies of the speaker are, to be sure, presented with the painful honesty which is held nowadays to ensure poetic quality. I don’t believe it ever does, but to say anything disapproving about such sincere disclosures of anguish would leave me open to the accusation of not being a warm, caring human being, a charge which I would find so woundingly hurtful that I feel I have no choice but passively to allow emotional honesty to fulfill its role of forestalling criticism, and be silent. About the style of this verse, however, I feel no such reticence.
For a book so widely praised for its poetical accomplishment, the verse here at points actually seems startlingly sloppy, factually, stylistically, and even grammatically. For instance, grammatically:
where what cannot
be seen is inferred by what the visible
does …
This is simply bad English: you infer from; you imply by. The fact that these words are confused by many people doesn’t make the confusion sound any less inept and vulgar in a supposedly serious piece of literature. Or, factually:
Meanwhile the planets
orbited each other, the morning and the evening came
No doubt the morning and the evening came, but we may be sure the planets did not orbit each other.
Another standard creative writing gimmick used here, one seen regularly in recent academic poetry, is the sprinkling of deliberately obscure words: “stallor, tomentose, surcingle, ligate, latchet, slub …” (this last, I’m afraid, being a term more likely to be familiar, to youthful readers at least, in its currency as an internet slang insult than in its formal meaning of a thick spot in yarn.) Another usage I had to blink at was:
… a flurry
of tears like a wirra of knives …
Maybe there is more than one word wirra, but the only one I know is an old-fashioned Irish exclamation of woe which, while no doubt originally Irish, has for at least a century and a half been used in English almost exclusively in the popularized dialect of sentimental stereotyped Irish songs and novels, giving the word in English contexts an ineluctable connotation of “stage Irish:” to my ear, comparing tears to “a wirra of knives” sounds as bizarre as describing surprise as “a begorrah of eyebrows.” For some reason, though, several reviewers have quoted the phrase admiringly as an example of bold poetic creativity. Well, there’s no accounting for tastes.
There is of course nothing intrinsically wrong with a poet using an obscure word, but it’s a matter of why. So far as I can see, in these poems this eccentric diction rarely adds vividness to the images or depth to the connotations. But if a poem is going to send most of its readers off to the dictionary, it had better have a good reason for doing so. The only reason I can see for doing so in books like this is showing off: “See I’m a poet, so I’m using the FULL RESOURCES OF THE LANGUAGE!” (Professor, will these words be on the exam?)
More evidence of shallowness of technique is provided by the throwaway allusions scattered throughout the book. Literary allusions are supposed to give depth and resonance to a present work by invoking the light of tradition to cast multiple shadows from it. But the allusions in these poems seemed to me, like the obscure words, usually just there for the sake of show, or, like the punning title, to give the reader a chance to feel clever. They take the most famous bits of great works (presumably on the assumption that those are the only bits today's readers will know or remember) and simply paste them into the verse, without much attention being paid to whether the allusions really resonate in their context. For instance, in "Material Ode" (page 7, also may be viewable in the amazon preview), we have two allusions to the famous beginning lines of Vergil's Aeneid, "of arms and the man I sing," and one to the most famous lines penned by a woman novelist, Jane Eyre's, "Reader, I married him." But these quotes have only a vague relation to the situation in the poem: all right, the poem, like The Aeneid, sings of a man, but that's as far as it goes (except for a rather inept pun on "arms" as an embrace), and the poem, like the Jane Eyre quote, is about a marriage, but that's as far as that goes.
To give examples of how it could be done better, a poet who knew how to use allusion effectively could have brought in a different famous line from Vergil, copied later by Dante, "I recognize the tokens of the ancient flame," which would have connected the present situation with a classic story of an abandoned woman as well as setting up suggestions of working through a purgatorial emotional state, and maybe also ironically invoking an image of redemption through love. Or if such a poem wants to bring in a great woman novelist, the three syllables "badly done" would suggest to anyone familiar with Jane Austen's work a complex of reproach, regret, and emotional misstep which could resonate with the poem's situation. Such subtleties of allusion seem beyond this book. But given the current state of literacy in America, they would probably be beyond most of the book's audience too.
As another example of careless technique, consider the lines from “Years Later” (p. 85):
like the face of a creature looking out
from inside its Knox…
The problem here is that this statement is likely to be incomprehensible to anyone who hears it rather than reads it: is the creature somehow inside “knocks?” or inside the Latin word for night, “nox?” Relying on the capital letter to clarify a meaning (which is presumably “fortress”) which wouldn't come across orally is technically careless. (Though as a matter of fact even with the capital letter the phrase is a little confusing: the first time I read it, I thought the creature was in a bowl of gelatin.) This may seem like a small point, but false notes in poetry are as egregious as they are in music, at least they are if the poetry is seriously trying to be any good.
Should anyone object that my comments are harsh, my defense is to point out that the reputation of a book which has won the accolades mentioned above will hardly be impaired by the opinion of a nobody like myself. But though my opinion may not be significant, I, like everyone, have a right to it, and my opinion is that this is a bad book, and that the fact that it’s been received as such a good one is shocking and discouraging evidence of the abysmal state to which the professors have reduced both our poetry and our taste.
September 26, 2020
Stag’s Leap
Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine
looks like my husband, casting himself off a
cliff in his fervor to get free of me.
His fur is rough and cozy, his face
placid, tranced, ruminant,
the bough of each furculum reaches back
to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up
and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic,
unwieldy. He bears its bony tray
level as he soars from the precipice edge,
dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart
leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from,
I am half on the side of the leaver. It's so quiet,
and empty, when he's left. I feel like a landscape,
a ground without a figure. Sauve
qui peut—let those who can save themselves
save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone
tiny being crucified
on a fallow deer’s antlers. I feel like his victim,
and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched
legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he
throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his
faithfulness, as if it was
a compliment, rather than a state
of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he
feel he had to walk around
carrying my books on his head like a stack of
posture volumes, or the rack of horns
hung where a hunter washes the venison
down with the sauvignon? Oh leap,
leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old
vow have to wish him happiness
in his new life, even sexual
joy? I fear so, at first, when I still
can’t tell us apart. Below his shaggy
belly, in the distance, lie the even dots
of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots
clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their
blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans.
—Sharon Olds
I read Satan Says, her 1980 first book, as I read this latest, 2012, effort, and the first is maybe a little edgier, a little scarier and more disturbing and thus, for me, a little more exciting, but this one is very powerful. If we have read the "confessional" poetry of Olds oever the years, we have gotten to know this ex, this husband, the object of much fierce love. But there remains in this book that familiar passion, a mixture of rage and tenderness, with sharp language, and always blunt and always surprising.
I recall reading her memoirish account of her nursing her (incestuous, and that's key) father to his death. Intensely anguished and complicated, this love that seemed to have survived in some fashion to the very end. Olds's work: This is not poetry to lull you to sleep, lyrical poetry, but poetry to wake you up for your own life and tragedy and passions. She provides a model and inspiration for you to document your life as she has done. Memoir poetry. Narrative. Not language poetry, though there is some rich and exciting language within the narratives, and now, at the end of a 32-year marriage, she takes out her language scalpel and dissects the process of relationship grief.
And why read this? To see with what grace we can learn how to live our own suffering, how to celebrate what we can along the way, as she does, trying to be fair to the riches of the past and present amongst the wreckage. Anyway, through this revisiting Olds I loved getting to know her again, like an old friend. She's talking to us, so invites this fantasy of being intimate with us. There are stunning poems in this new book, as strong as ever.
Maybe there is more tenderness, less rage, and maybe you miss that young screaming, that shocking shout and cry, that blunt fuck you, but there are forgiveness and joy in surprising places, and that's what I need to learn, always. She teaches us how to live in some traditions of great literature, the tradition of humane letters and the tradition of writing as healing, how to draw from that, the elegy, the personal. She has no secrets and thus she tells you one way how to write, to turn yourself inside out. Loved it, loved it.
Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine
looks like my husband, casting himself off a
cliff in his fervor to get free of me.
His fur is rough and cozy, his face
placid, tranced, ruminant,
the bough of each furculum reaches back
to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up
and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic,
unwieldy. He bears its bony tray
level as he soars from the precipice edge,
dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart
leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from,
I am half on the side of the leaver. It's so quiet,
and empty, when he's left. I feel like a landscape,
a ground without a figure. Sauve
qui peut—let those who can save themselves
save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone
tiny being crucified
on a fallow deer’s antlers. I feel like his victim,
and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched
legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he
throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his
faithfulness, as if it was
a compliment, rather than a state
of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he
feel he had to walk around
carrying my books on his head like a stack of
posture volumes, or the rack of horns
hung where a hunter washes the venison
down with the sauvignon? Oh leap,
leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old
vow have to wish him happiness
in his new life, even sexual
joy? I fear so, at first, when I still
can’t tell us apart. Below his shaggy
belly, in the distance, lie the even dots
of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots
clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their
blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans.
—Sharon Olds
I read Satan Says, her 1980 first book, as I read this latest, 2012, effort, and the first is maybe a little edgier, a little scarier and more disturbing and thus, for me, a little more exciting, but this one is very powerful. If we have read the "confessional" poetry of Olds oever the years, we have gotten to know this ex, this husband, the object of much fierce love. But there remains in this book that familiar passion, a mixture of rage and tenderness, with sharp language, and always blunt and always surprising.
I recall reading her memoirish account of her nursing her (incestuous, and that's key) father to his death. Intensely anguished and complicated, this love that seemed to have survived in some fashion to the very end. Olds's work: This is not poetry to lull you to sleep, lyrical poetry, but poetry to wake you up for your own life and tragedy and passions. She provides a model and inspiration for you to document your life as she has done. Memoir poetry. Narrative. Not language poetry, though there is some rich and exciting language within the narratives, and now, at the end of a 32-year marriage, she takes out her language scalpel and dissects the process of relationship grief.
And why read this? To see with what grace we can learn how to live our own suffering, how to celebrate what we can along the way, as she does, trying to be fair to the riches of the past and present amongst the wreckage. Anyway, through this revisiting Olds I loved getting to know her again, like an old friend. She's talking to us, so invites this fantasy of being intimate with us. There are stunning poems in this new book, as strong as ever.
Maybe there is more tenderness, less rage, and maybe you miss that young screaming, that shocking shout and cry, that blunt fuck you, but there are forgiveness and joy in surprising places, and that's what I need to learn, always. She teaches us how to live in some traditions of great literature, the tradition of humane letters and the tradition of writing as healing, how to draw from that, the elegy, the personal. She has no secrets and thus she tells you one way how to write, to turn yourself inside out. Loved it, loved it.
March 28, 2017
An entire book of poems about a divorce after thirty years of marriage examines love and loss, age and youth, the body, what it is to be together and to be alone, and successfully capturing the most beautiful, subtle moments of realization. I've never seen the subject of marriage examined with such quiet honesty. It reminded me of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, about Plath--though this is nowhere near as tragic, and Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband, especially in the descriptions of the husband physically. But this collection is about divorce reflected in the eye of Sharon Olds, reflecting her particular temperament, which happens to be loving, generous and fair. In reading the book, I imagined many times what Plath would have said here, if she had been the one left, or what Sexton would have said. Plath was such a good hater, and Sexton could be so cruel. None of that here.
The first poems are the first inkling, the first admissions, when it still might be otherwise. Then the dawning that it was going to be real. How to tell her ancient mother. How to tell her own body that he is gone--this is one of my favorites of the collection, "Poem for the Breasts":
"...All year they have been calling to my departed husband,
singing to him, like a pair of soaking
sirens on a scaled rock.
They can't believe he's left them, it's not in their
vocabulary, they being made
of promise..."
Every subtle but horrible moment, like giving him back his things, things she's lived with for three decades, in "Object Loss":
",,,I had not known
how connected I'd felt, through him, to a world of
handed-down, signed, dated,
appraised things, pedigreed matter...
I feel as if I'm falling away
from family--as if each ponderous
object had been keeping me afloat. No, they were
the scenery of the play now closing..."
Although the Plath in me wanted her to sweetly dump his stuff in the pool, or sell it at a yard sale for $1, or burn it on the girlfriend's lawn. But it wouldn't be Olds, who is far too grownup for tantrums.
What she does capture are the bizarre corners of divorce--how she wants to comfort him for the pain he's feeling for leaving her in "Last Look"
"all that day until then, I had been
comforting him, for the shock he was in
at his pain--the last of leaving me
took him back, to his own early
losses. But now it was time to go beyond
comfort, to part..."
and then there's "Not Going To Him" that insane but human way we want to be comforted by the very person who delivered us the blow, because he is the one we are closest to--very like breaking an addiction:
"Minute by minute, I do not get up and just go to him...
It is what I do now: not go, not
see or touch..."
the book is divided up into sections--the first parting (January-December), the first aloneness (winter), then Spring, Summer, Fall and Years Later. She moves ahead and falls back, as each aspect is examined, the personal and the universal. Here is the moment she finds a picture of the other woman in the washing machine, and here the moment where she wishes he had just died, that that would be easier. Wonderful erotic detail informs us there was a reason she was so besotted of this man, and what to do with her eroticism now that he is gone--I loved that in a poem called "French Bra"--just the description is like touch:
"... like a hermes heel-wing,
fitted with struts and ailerons,
fragile as a silk biplane, the soutien-
gorge lies, lissome, unguarded..."
Memories of a miscarriage they'd had, memories of a summer rental home, and then, years later--coming across him at an art opening in "Running into You":
"... But you seemed
covered with her, like a child working with glue
who's young to be working with glue...
When I went up to you two, at the art opening,
I felt I had nothing to apologize for,
I felt like a somewhat buoyant creature
with feet of I don't know what, recovered-from sorrow..."
The issue she comes back to is how she had not really known how he felt, that she had made assumptions about him, that the betrayal was not just his. A beautiful multifaceted collection equal to its subject.
"
The first poems are the first inkling, the first admissions, when it still might be otherwise. Then the dawning that it was going to be real. How to tell her ancient mother. How to tell her own body that he is gone--this is one of my favorites of the collection, "Poem for the Breasts":
"...All year they have been calling to my departed husband,
singing to him, like a pair of soaking
sirens on a scaled rock.
They can't believe he's left them, it's not in their
vocabulary, they being made
of promise..."
Every subtle but horrible moment, like giving him back his things, things she's lived with for three decades, in "Object Loss":
",,,I had not known
how connected I'd felt, through him, to a world of
handed-down, signed, dated,
appraised things, pedigreed matter...
I feel as if I'm falling away
from family--as if each ponderous
object had been keeping me afloat. No, they were
the scenery of the play now closing..."
Although the Plath in me wanted her to sweetly dump his stuff in the pool, or sell it at a yard sale for $1, or burn it on the girlfriend's lawn. But it wouldn't be Olds, who is far too grownup for tantrums.
What she does capture are the bizarre corners of divorce--how she wants to comfort him for the pain he's feeling for leaving her in "Last Look"
"all that day until then, I had been
comforting him, for the shock he was in
at his pain--the last of leaving me
took him back, to his own early
losses. But now it was time to go beyond
comfort, to part..."
and then there's "Not Going To Him" that insane but human way we want to be comforted by the very person who delivered us the blow, because he is the one we are closest to--very like breaking an addiction:
"Minute by minute, I do not get up and just go to him...
It is what I do now: not go, not
see or touch..."
the book is divided up into sections--the first parting (January-December), the first aloneness (winter), then Spring, Summer, Fall and Years Later. She moves ahead and falls back, as each aspect is examined, the personal and the universal. Here is the moment she finds a picture of the other woman in the washing machine, and here the moment where she wishes he had just died, that that would be easier. Wonderful erotic detail informs us there was a reason she was so besotted of this man, and what to do with her eroticism now that he is gone--I loved that in a poem called "French Bra"--just the description is like touch:
"... like a hermes heel-wing,
fitted with struts and ailerons,
fragile as a silk biplane, the soutien-
gorge lies, lissome, unguarded..."
Memories of a miscarriage they'd had, memories of a summer rental home, and then, years later--coming across him at an art opening in "Running into You":
"... But you seemed
covered with her, like a child working with glue
who's young to be working with glue...
When I went up to you two, at the art opening,
I felt I had nothing to apologize for,
I felt like a somewhat buoyant creature
with feet of I don't know what, recovered-from sorrow..."
The issue she comes back to is how she had not really known how he felt, that she had made assumptions about him, that the betrayal was not just his. A beautiful multifaceted collection equal to its subject.
"
January 4, 2018
I started this over the summer, but it was run over by the unlicensed drivers of other books. Somehow, though, it nosed its way to a spot where I could see it. You know, on those messy pile of books I have on the shelf in front of the already-crammed bookshelves.
During the summer, I recall being a bit annoyed with this collection despite Olds' reputation. I have another collection of hers that I liked much more. The trouble with Stag's Leap? Every stinking poem--yes, even the good ones--is about the dissolution of her marriage.
Thus, the break did me some good. Reading the last third helped in a just-a-spoonful-of-sugar-helps-the-poems-go-down way. I'm giving it 3 stars because I know it has some merit. Overall, though, I felt like I was the one going through a slow break-up. On and on and on.
And if I were her ex-husband, I'd be none too happy about having our personal lives hung out on the line like so much laundry for the neighbors to see. Sheesh. Talk about Medusa's revenge!
During the summer, I recall being a bit annoyed with this collection despite Olds' reputation. I have another collection of hers that I liked much more. The trouble with Stag's Leap? Every stinking poem--yes, even the good ones--is about the dissolution of her marriage.
Thus, the break did me some good. Reading the last third helped in a just-a-spoonful-of-sugar-helps-the-poems-go-down way. I'm giving it 3 stars because I know it has some merit. Overall, though, I felt like I was the one going through a slow break-up. On and on and on.
And if I were her ex-husband, I'd be none too happy about having our personal lives hung out on the line like so much laundry for the neighbors to see. Sheesh. Talk about Medusa's revenge!
May 15, 2016
I'm not a poet, and I admit that there were some poems here that were hard to understand. But I felt the Sharon Olds' pain and grief. And that's what matters to me: that the poet was able to channel her emotions to me, the reader. That she was able to relate to me the ruthless beauty of what she was going through.
March 12, 2016
My middling rating is for the collection as a whole, while individual poems I would rank more highly if I could. The series of poems were written during and after the poet's husband divorced her for another woman after thirty or so years of marriage. Oh, her! They are deeply personal, confessional in style, and sometimes embarrassing to read (for me). There was something about reading them that felt too much like looking through another woman's bedside drawer. The repetition of the theme - the loss of this one man - was a bit unpleasant for an entire volume.
Still, there were moments of beautiful detail and description of ordinary things. In "On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult," Olds's description of the handling of paper pages is exactly right: "I am / letting fall what I have read, / and creasing what's left lengthwise, the crackly / rustle [. . . ] / that sitting waltz with the paper, / undressing its layers, blowsing it, / opening and closing its delicate bellows, / folding till only a single column is un- / taken in." Even smaller details brought joy to the reading. In another poem, "September 2001, New York City," she recalls signing her divorce papers and coming "down to the / ground floor of the Chrysler Building, / the intact beauty of its lobby around us / like a king's tomb, on the ceiling the little / painted plane, in the mural, flying." The poem is a rich meditation on life and death, but once again I wished that her husband wasn't in it. I just got tired of the guy.
Despite the occasional jarring note and the soon-to-be-ex-husband / now-ex-husband motif, I enjoyed most of the work. It would be hard to live through the pain of losing a long-standing marriage so suddenly or losing the man you have loved for so many years to another woman who did not have his children, did not have the shared past with him that you did.
Still, there were moments of beautiful detail and description of ordinary things. In "On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult," Olds's description of the handling of paper pages is exactly right: "I am / letting fall what I have read, / and creasing what's left lengthwise, the crackly / rustle [. . . ] / that sitting waltz with the paper, / undressing its layers, blowsing it, / opening and closing its delicate bellows, / folding till only a single column is un- / taken in." Even smaller details brought joy to the reading. In another poem, "September 2001, New York City," she recalls signing her divorce papers and coming "down to the / ground floor of the Chrysler Building, / the intact beauty of its lobby around us / like a king's tomb, on the ceiling the little / painted plane, in the mural, flying." The poem is a rich meditation on life and death, but once again I wished that her husband wasn't in it. I just got tired of the guy.
Despite the occasional jarring note and the soon-to-be-ex-husband / now-ex-husband motif, I enjoyed most of the work. It would be hard to live through the pain of losing a long-standing marriage so suddenly or losing the man you have loved for so many years to another woman who did not have his children, did not have the shared past with him that you did.
June 3, 2020
These poems relate to the dissolution of her 30-year marriage when he husband leaves her for another woman. Most of the poems are of the pining sort, which left me wondering where was the rage and self-doubt and all the other emotions that surely must come from such a huge upheaval in life.
April 7, 2013
The title of Sharon Olds’ poetry collection detailing her painful, unwanted divorce is the perfect metaphor, and yet that wasn’t clear to me until I read the note in the book. Stags Leap is the favorite wine of Olds and her former husband. By adding the apostrophe, Olds gives us an incredible metaphor for a man leaving his wife. She was able to use the official logo from the winery, that of a single stag leaping, perhaps throwing himself, off a cliff.
Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine
looks like my husband, casting himself off a
cliff in his fervor to get free of me.
(Stag’s Leap)
This book is clearly confessional poetry, and Olds finally claims the genre. In an interview in the Huffington Post, she says, after years of avoiding the label, “What's so bad about admitting I don't make anything up? So I started admitting that. Now I am happy to talk about how, for me, unlike most poets, the imagination is not very active." http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/...
Olds makes good use of metaphor and simile in her details of a long marriage falling apart. She is honest in sharing that the lust and love one feels doesn’t disappear instantly.
My body may never learn
not to yearn for that one,
(Not Going to Him)
I tell him I will try to fall out of
love with him, but I feel I will love him
all my life.
(The Flurry)
The ways Olds refers to her husband throughout the collection signify the emotional transitions since he left. In the early poems, she calls him her husband, then her “almost-no-longer husband” (Unspeakable), then moves to “my then husband” (The Healers), which implies there is still a connection. She finally uses the blunt term “my ex”. These terms are not entirely chronological, however, which gives the reader insight into the complexity of the fact that while the marriage may dissolve legally in a linear progression, the emotional dissolution is more roundabout.
There is agony in the second guessing, the wondering why his love ended.
Then I
felt in my whole body, for a second,
that I have not loved enough
(Telling My Mother)
Dread and sorrow reaching, in time, into
every reach, there comes the hour
I wonder if my husband left me
because I was not quiet enough
in our bed.
(Not Quiet Enough)
Olds is able to look at the marriage and acknowledge that perhaps she really didn’t know this man.
But from within my illusion of him
I could not see him, or know him.
(Frontis Nulla Fides)
While there is plenty of angst over being left, rarely do we see anger. Even her writing is measured, polite, and considerate of how he must have been feeling.
I think he had come, in private, to
feel he was dying, with me,
(Pain I Did Not)
Eventually, in the section captioned “Years Later”, Olds says
And slowly he starts to seem more far
away, he seems to waft, drift
(Slowly He Starts)
In the final poem, “What Left?”, Olds admits that within the marriage “We fulfilled something in each other.” Rather than ending with being left, the poem concludes with the line “I freed him, he freed me.”
Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine
looks like my husband, casting himself off a
cliff in his fervor to get free of me.
(Stag’s Leap)
This book is clearly confessional poetry, and Olds finally claims the genre. In an interview in the Huffington Post, she says, after years of avoiding the label, “What's so bad about admitting I don't make anything up? So I started admitting that. Now I am happy to talk about how, for me, unlike most poets, the imagination is not very active." http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/...
Olds makes good use of metaphor and simile in her details of a long marriage falling apart. She is honest in sharing that the lust and love one feels doesn’t disappear instantly.
My body may never learn
not to yearn for that one,
(Not Going to Him)
I tell him I will try to fall out of
love with him, but I feel I will love him
all my life.
(The Flurry)
The ways Olds refers to her husband throughout the collection signify the emotional transitions since he left. In the early poems, she calls him her husband, then her “almost-no-longer husband” (Unspeakable), then moves to “my then husband” (The Healers), which implies there is still a connection. She finally uses the blunt term “my ex”. These terms are not entirely chronological, however, which gives the reader insight into the complexity of the fact that while the marriage may dissolve legally in a linear progression, the emotional dissolution is more roundabout.
There is agony in the second guessing, the wondering why his love ended.
Then I
felt in my whole body, for a second,
that I have not loved enough
(Telling My Mother)
Dread and sorrow reaching, in time, into
every reach, there comes the hour
I wonder if my husband left me
because I was not quiet enough
in our bed.
(Not Quiet Enough)
Olds is able to look at the marriage and acknowledge that perhaps she really didn’t know this man.
But from within my illusion of him
I could not see him, or know him.
(Frontis Nulla Fides)
While there is plenty of angst over being left, rarely do we see anger. Even her writing is measured, polite, and considerate of how he must have been feeling.
I think he had come, in private, to
feel he was dying, with me,
(Pain I Did Not)
Eventually, in the section captioned “Years Later”, Olds says
And slowly he starts to seem more far
away, he seems to waft, drift
(Slowly He Starts)
In the final poem, “What Left?”, Olds admits that within the marriage “We fulfilled something in each other.” Rather than ending with being left, the poem concludes with the line “I freed him, he freed me.”
March 31, 2022
Can't help but notice that the lead review here is negative and written by a crabby old white man. Perhaps he was not the audience for this book. I am. Loved it. These poems combined art and craft, emotion, lived life, and wrestling with truth. From the minute adjustment in perspective that comes from the placement of the apostrophe in the title to each of the exquisitely crafted poems, I savored this book, confining myself usually to just a poem a day. The book traces the end of a marriage, before, during and after the rupture. It's filled with images and language of pain, truth, and beauty.
January 2, 2014
A transcendent collection, truly. I read this as part of a poetry class curriculum and was taken aback by how truly and utterly absorbed I became with each subsequent poem.
For those who don't know, I'm an aspiring writer, but of prose not poetry. I've read (or have "or been exposed to") a selection of some of the greats such as Eliot, Dickenson, Dante and have loved most of them (Dante in particular). But in reading those works I always felt like an interloper, an almost tolerated visitor in a strange land. It never felt like a land that I could ever call 'mine'.
Upon entering the poetry seminar these feelings surged to the fore. My instructor was an imposing woman of unmatched intensity who could pick a part lazy writing and any lack of soul with a glance. I passed the class, somehow, and actually felt and even still feel that I truly earned that grade. But call it initiation, call it an extended sojourn, whatever, but I ingested more poetry in those three months than I had ever had before. It was an intense experience that, along with several other physical and mental factors, burned itself into my neural pathways and, I think, fundamentally altered my literary hard-wiring, as it were.
But to Miss Olds and her work, I feel inherently unequipped to say what I want to say outside of a few bloodless platitudes. This collection takes us through the process of a long, long, and incredibly painful divorce between a woman (presumably Olds) and her husband of decades. With full language that borders on prose without ever bursting or trivializing its source genre, we don't read these poems as experience them in a sensual labyrinth that takes lets us inhabit moments in the life (and death) of this marriage.
It's a painful read, but not maliciously so. Sharon Olds bares her soul to us with a soulful ache that resonates off the page and fills you to the brim. There's little in the way of 'ease' here. Though not surreal or absurdist (the poems possess a silken coherency) effort is asked of the reader to expand their literary sensibilities (attaining, if only momentarily, TS Eliot's vaunted 'poetic sensibility' as stated from his introduction to Barnes "Nightwood")to encompass the horizons Olds leads them across. Think of your eyes used to a darkness or soft light having now, only now, a dire need to take in the empyrean brilliance of these very painful, but very real, poetic landscapes.
It's visceral, brutal, but will leave you with the kind of ache that is almost loving, a pain you're glad to have because you know its presence means you're alive.
For those who don't know, I'm an aspiring writer, but of prose not poetry. I've read (or have "or been exposed to") a selection of some of the greats such as Eliot, Dickenson, Dante and have loved most of them (Dante in particular). But in reading those works I always felt like an interloper, an almost tolerated visitor in a strange land. It never felt like a land that I could ever call 'mine'.
Upon entering the poetry seminar these feelings surged to the fore. My instructor was an imposing woman of unmatched intensity who could pick a part lazy writing and any lack of soul with a glance. I passed the class, somehow, and actually felt and even still feel that I truly earned that grade. But call it initiation, call it an extended sojourn, whatever, but I ingested more poetry in those three months than I had ever had before. It was an intense experience that, along with several other physical and mental factors, burned itself into my neural pathways and, I think, fundamentally altered my literary hard-wiring, as it were.
But to Miss Olds and her work, I feel inherently unequipped to say what I want to say outside of a few bloodless platitudes. This collection takes us through the process of a long, long, and incredibly painful divorce between a woman (presumably Olds) and her husband of decades. With full language that borders on prose without ever bursting or trivializing its source genre, we don't read these poems as experience them in a sensual labyrinth that takes lets us inhabit moments in the life (and death) of this marriage.
It's a painful read, but not maliciously so. Sharon Olds bares her soul to us with a soulful ache that resonates off the page and fills you to the brim. There's little in the way of 'ease' here. Though not surreal or absurdist (the poems possess a silken coherency) effort is asked of the reader to expand their literary sensibilities (attaining, if only momentarily, TS Eliot's vaunted 'poetic sensibility' as stated from his introduction to Barnes "Nightwood")to encompass the horizons Olds leads them across. Think of your eyes used to a darkness or soft light having now, only now, a dire need to take in the empyrean brilliance of these very painful, but very real, poetic landscapes.
It's visceral, brutal, but will leave you with the kind of ache that is almost loving, a pain you're glad to have because you know its presence means you're alive.
January 23, 2014
Can you imagine the farthest limit to loving a person? Do we really believe love can be boundless?
Sharon Olds goes down the rabbit hole, literally. I'm intimidated by how bright the entrance sign is and terrified of the long dark road back.
Love is fucking insane. It's Bjork singing her state of emergency yes, but it's also Sharon Olds as daring as Plath O silk, O slub, O cocoon stolen
let those who can save themselves same themselves. (i.e. not for the faint of heart)
Sharon Olds goes down the rabbit hole, literally. I'm intimidated by how bright the entrance sign is and terrified of the long dark road back.
Love is fucking insane. It's Bjork singing her state of emergency yes, but it's also Sharon Olds as daring as Plath O silk, O slub, O cocoon stolen
let those who can save themselves same themselves. (i.e. not for the faint of heart)
December 31, 2014
I'm kind of stunned that this won a Pulitzer Prize. It is described as "unflinching." Sometimes I wonder if there are a few things in this world that, when we look at them, we wouldn't be better off flinching.
I first learned about Sharon Olds in my Contemporary Poetry class, which as a sophomore English major was one of my first deep -- I mean, really deep -- dives into literature, literary pretense, and all that separates them. That's the class where I learned about all the modern biggies, you know, your Gary Snyders and your Adrienne Riches and your Ezra Pound influences and all that, and where I wrote a big ol' term paper on Allen Ginsberg and where I began to realize that I belonged with these poetry-spoutin' English department people (I refer, of course, to the professors as well as the students). I don't really remember which of Sharon Olds' poems we read in that class, but anyway, since then she's been on my radar. In 2013, the good Pulitzer folks saw fit to bestow upon her their honor. Why? Why, oh why?
Like scatological humor and some of our natural body processes, I find these poems a)unnecessary to share and b)definitely not that artistically great to warrant taking that risk that sharing them would be unnecessary. Besides the general "meh" ness of the emotions revealed (we get it. you were in love.) there's something kind of unseemly about them. Like, have you no shame? Or didn't your parents teach you to put on a brave face? Ever? I think I'm supposed to relate to the universal themes of love/relationships/heartbreak and so forth while reading this book. I don't. I don't feel her pain upon reading these poems. I feel pity for her. I feel embarrassed for her.
I imagine that's not what the poet wants?
Shakespeare's sonnets these ain't.
I'd say skip this, unless you're (sigh) a Pulitzer completist, like someone I know...
I first learned about Sharon Olds in my Contemporary Poetry class, which as a sophomore English major was one of my first deep -- I mean, really deep -- dives into literature, literary pretense, and all that separates them. That's the class where I learned about all the modern biggies, you know, your Gary Snyders and your Adrienne Riches and your Ezra Pound influences and all that, and where I wrote a big ol' term paper on Allen Ginsberg and where I began to realize that I belonged with these poetry-spoutin' English department people (I refer, of course, to the professors as well as the students). I don't really remember which of Sharon Olds' poems we read in that class, but anyway, since then she's been on my radar. In 2013, the good Pulitzer folks saw fit to bestow upon her their honor. Why? Why, oh why?
Like scatological humor and some of our natural body processes, I find these poems a)unnecessary to share and b)definitely not that artistically great to warrant taking that risk that sharing them would be unnecessary. Besides the general "meh" ness of the emotions revealed (we get it. you were in love.) there's something kind of unseemly about them. Like, have you no shame? Or didn't your parents teach you to put on a brave face? Ever? I think I'm supposed to relate to the universal themes of love/relationships/heartbreak and so forth while reading this book. I don't. I don't feel her pain upon reading these poems. I feel pity for her. I feel embarrassed for her.
I imagine that's not what the poet wants?
Shakespeare's sonnets these ain't.
I'd say skip this, unless you're (sigh) a Pulitzer completist, like someone I know...
December 4, 2020
This won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2013, and holy smokes I can see why.
You know how you never know what another couple's relationship is like - hell, you only really know 50% of your own - well, this is a guided tour of the end of one. The author's husband of 30 years tells her he wants out of the marriage.
This collection of poems is an astounding look at the complexity of emotions that surround that event. I read each poem twice. Slowly. Over the course of several weeks. You need time to digest what you read. I was blown away by her honesty and how much she lets us in. We see it all - the light and the dark, the joy and the pain, the loss and the healing. I am in awe of Ms. Olds, and am now accumulating all her work.
You know how you never know what another couple's relationship is like - hell, you only really know 50% of your own - well, this is a guided tour of the end of one. The author's husband of 30 years tells her he wants out of the marriage.
This collection of poems is an astounding look at the complexity of emotions that surround that event. I read each poem twice. Slowly. Over the course of several weeks. You need time to digest what you read. I was blown away by her honesty and how much she lets us in. We see it all - the light and the dark, the joy and the pain, the loss and the healing. I am in awe of Ms. Olds, and am now accumulating all her work.
December 16, 2013
I bought Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds last year because her face flickered by on my facebook news feed and I liked her face. I remembered I had a boyfriend in college who went around with books by Sharon Olds and Jorie Graham. Which is pretty interesting now that I think of it, but at the time I thought all twenty-year old men could relate to the poetry of older women with daddy issues.
Stag’s Leap is a book of poems about a divorce. But not just any divorce. The worst kind of divorce. What is the worst kind of divorce? I used to think they were all bad. But now I know a few divorced people (as opposed to children of divorced people) and I see that divorce is not bad. People wouldn’t get divorced if it were a bad choice. It looks like a very good choice, even a fantastic thing, for the married people who choose it. It’s really an act of deep acceptance. This marriage isn’t working. Let’s get divorced.
But sometimes it’s good for one partner, bad for the other. That’s what Stag’s Leap is about. The worst kind of divorce being this: after thirty years of marriage, Sharon Olds’ husband left her for another woman.
The poet found a photo of her husband’s mistress in the washing machine. She showed it to him.
SHE: Hey, honey, isn’t this a photo of that woman you work with?
HE: Yes, we went running together, she gave me the photo. It must have fallen out of the pocket. Of my shorts.
SHE: Oh.
In the photo, the other woman was wearing a bathing suit.
Stomach-ache. All over.
Here’s the arc of the book: complacency, discovery, shock, despair, fear, anger (restrained), acceptance, liberation. At last Olds sees that her husband has freed her, and himself, from a bond that was built on buried truths and undiscovered selves.
But you know what? The sex was good. Up until the day he packed his stuff up and moved across the city. The sex was good, people.
[SPOILER ALERT IF THERE CAN BE SUCH A THING IN A BOOK OF POEMS]
Well, he eventually marries the mistress.
Does Sharon Olds find a new guy or gal?
We don’t find out.
She is mourning the death of her young sexual self. Which left when her husband walked out. Can’t get that back.
She builds poem after poem from the same five colors and the same stack of wood by the sea. Reshaping. Retelling. Seeking. Sculpting. And it’s so deliciously good. You read the poems, you feel the pain, you cry, you keep reading, you get used to the pain, you don’t cry anymore. You keep reading, you get a little weary of the pain, you flip ahead a few pages. What happens next is . . .
Stag’s Leap is a book of poems about a divorce. But not just any divorce. The worst kind of divorce. What is the worst kind of divorce? I used to think they were all bad. But now I know a few divorced people (as opposed to children of divorced people) and I see that divorce is not bad. People wouldn’t get divorced if it were a bad choice. It looks like a very good choice, even a fantastic thing, for the married people who choose it. It’s really an act of deep acceptance. This marriage isn’t working. Let’s get divorced.
But sometimes it’s good for one partner, bad for the other. That’s what Stag’s Leap is about. The worst kind of divorce being this: after thirty years of marriage, Sharon Olds’ husband left her for another woman.
The poet found a photo of her husband’s mistress in the washing machine. She showed it to him.
SHE: Hey, honey, isn’t this a photo of that woman you work with?
HE: Yes, we went running together, she gave me the photo. It must have fallen out of the pocket. Of my shorts.
SHE: Oh.
In the photo, the other woman was wearing a bathing suit.
Stomach-ache. All over.
Here’s the arc of the book: complacency, discovery, shock, despair, fear, anger (restrained), acceptance, liberation. At last Olds sees that her husband has freed her, and himself, from a bond that was built on buried truths and undiscovered selves.
But you know what? The sex was good. Up until the day he packed his stuff up and moved across the city. The sex was good, people.
[SPOILER ALERT IF THERE CAN BE SUCH A THING IN A BOOK OF POEMS]
Well, he eventually marries the mistress.
Does Sharon Olds find a new guy or gal?
We don’t find out.
She is mourning the death of her young sexual self. Which left when her husband walked out. Can’t get that back.
She builds poem after poem from the same five colors and the same stack of wood by the sea. Reshaping. Retelling. Seeking. Sculpting. And it’s so deliciously good. You read the poems, you feel the pain, you cry, you keep reading, you get used to the pain, you don’t cry anymore. You keep reading, you get a little weary of the pain, you flip ahead a few pages. What happens next is . . .
December 6, 2013
In this book, the author details the tremendous difficulty she experienced in moving on with her life after the end of her 32-year marriage. She notes several times the feeling that she hardly knew him, even after all the time they spent together.
Overall, I found the poetry dull: for me, all the minute details she used to describe her feelings overly drew out the message, introducing boredom into my experience rather than heightening the emotions.
It reminded me of a Hollywood movie where something sad happens, but the director tries to overwork the melodrama to the extent that you begin to care less rather than more because you don't feel invested enough in the material for a powerful reaction to be elicited.
There are some nice little bits here and there - e.g. 'When anyone escapes, my heart leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, I am half on the side of the leaver.' - but for me, these moments were too often buried in detail I was unable to care about.
After all the glowing reviews this book has received, I am really disappointed that I was unable to get into it.
Overall, I found the poetry dull: for me, all the minute details she used to describe her feelings overly drew out the message, introducing boredom into my experience rather than heightening the emotions.
It reminded me of a Hollywood movie where something sad happens, but the director tries to overwork the melodrama to the extent that you begin to care less rather than more because you don't feel invested enough in the material for a powerful reaction to be elicited.
There are some nice little bits here and there - e.g. 'When anyone escapes, my heart leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, I am half on the side of the leaver.' - but for me, these moments were too often buried in detail I was unable to care about.
After all the glowing reviews this book has received, I am really disappointed that I was unable to get into it.
July 18, 2023
"When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver" (Stag's Leap, 15).
July 2023: Everyone knows Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap, Louise Glück's Vita Nova, and Anne Carson's "Glass Essay" are the holy heartache trinity for literary gals. I don't make the rules.
"And you couldn't say, / could you, that the touch you had from me / was other than the touch of one / who could love for life" (Poem of Thanks, 82).
How differently this collection strikes my head and heart roughly a year later. I remember feeling pulled to a used copy while in Bath at the beginning of the year, not knowing all that would unfold. Around that same time, Jane Hirshfield's "The Visible Heat" began haunting my brain.
Olds' words are saturated with the rawness of grief, the eerie release after giving up the fight: "It is what I do now: not go, not / see or touch... / I am a stunned knower / of not" (Not Going to Him, 25).
She aptly captures the dilemma of the writer/beloved: "I who had no other / gift to give the world but to hold what I / thought was love's mirror up to us" (Not Quiet Enough, 48-49).
August 2022: Real poetry girlies get emotional about Sharon Olds at sunset on a park bench (prepared all the while to fend off seagulls from their gluten-free fish and chips).
4.5 stars. Stag's Leap is a blunt force trauma to the heart, a testimony there's no correct timeline for grief. I think it's interesting that I've been gravitating lately to poetry collections that so greatly diverge from my own life experiences; I haven't personally known divorce, miscarriage, or the death of parents, yet these words still penetrate my very marrow and rattle around in my brain.
Olds excavates love as fickle and yet, even so, the most beautiful thing we can have and hold.
"I thought / wherever we were, we were in lasting love - / even in our separateness and / loneliness, in love - even the / iceberg just outside the mouth, its / pallid, tilting, jade-white / was love's, as we were. We had said so" (Love, 31).
Even in the ache, hope and healing creep in like ivy: "I saw, again, how blessed my life has been, / first, to have been able to love, / then, to have the parting now behind me... " (Last Look, 14).
#sealeychallenge2022
July 2023: Everyone knows Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap, Louise Glück's Vita Nova, and Anne Carson's "Glass Essay" are the holy heartache trinity for literary gals. I don't make the rules.
"And you couldn't say, / could you, that the touch you had from me / was other than the touch of one / who could love for life" (Poem of Thanks, 82).
How differently this collection strikes my head and heart roughly a year later. I remember feeling pulled to a used copy while in Bath at the beginning of the year, not knowing all that would unfold. Around that same time, Jane Hirshfield's "The Visible Heat" began haunting my brain.
Olds' words are saturated with the rawness of grief, the eerie release after giving up the fight: "It is what I do now: not go, not / see or touch... / I am a stunned knower / of not" (Not Going to Him, 25).
She aptly captures the dilemma of the writer/beloved: "I who had no other / gift to give the world but to hold what I / thought was love's mirror up to us" (Not Quiet Enough, 48-49).
August 2022: Real poetry girlies get emotional about Sharon Olds at sunset on a park bench (prepared all the while to fend off seagulls from their gluten-free fish and chips).
4.5 stars. Stag's Leap is a blunt force trauma to the heart, a testimony there's no correct timeline for grief. I think it's interesting that I've been gravitating lately to poetry collections that so greatly diverge from my own life experiences; I haven't personally known divorce, miscarriage, or the death of parents, yet these words still penetrate my very marrow and rattle around in my brain.
Olds excavates love as fickle and yet, even so, the most beautiful thing we can have and hold.
"I thought / wherever we were, we were in lasting love - / even in our separateness and / loneliness, in love - even the / iceberg just outside the mouth, its / pallid, tilting, jade-white / was love's, as we were. We had said so" (Love, 31).
Even in the ache, hope and healing creep in like ivy: "I saw, again, how blessed my life has been, / first, to have been able to love, / then, to have the parting now behind me... " (Last Look, 14).
#sealeychallenge2022
December 30, 2012
Today is my 53rd birthday. On my birthday I try to enjoy some of the great pleasures of my life. I like to read from the Iliad and did so. I like to read an e e cummings poem so I recited one I have memorized. One I read first in 7th grade, which must have been 1973.
I decided not to take jog: a ran very few times this past year. I fractured my shoulder over Labor Day and that put off my exercising for months, or at least I let it put it off.
I enjoy sipping good teas so drank a Nishi First Flush from Japan, and then an aged puer ginger tea. Then sipped a red wine all the while reading Stag's Leap.
Stag's Leap is a good collection of poetry. It is not very uplifting, so reading this on my birthday put me in a mellow mood. Mellow is a word seldom used now. The poems all form a theme. Her husband left her after 30 years of marriage. The only people I've known for 30 years are family.
I have only been in love a few times, and none of them lasted very long.
The collection is accessible and well done. But after several poems I tired of reliving this parting. I wanted Sharon to say something terrifically positive, and well had to wait for it.
The triumph is certainly allowing readers to live through her emotions as she grows accustomed to be without her husband. We learn a lot about him. He ran. He practiced medicine, he left her for a colleague. Good riddance.
I decided not to take jog: a ran very few times this past year. I fractured my shoulder over Labor Day and that put off my exercising for months, or at least I let it put it off.
I enjoy sipping good teas so drank a Nishi First Flush from Japan, and then an aged puer ginger tea. Then sipped a red wine all the while reading Stag's Leap.
Stag's Leap is a good collection of poetry. It is not very uplifting, so reading this on my birthday put me in a mellow mood. Mellow is a word seldom used now. The poems all form a theme. Her husband left her after 30 years of marriage. The only people I've known for 30 years are family.
I have only been in love a few times, and none of them lasted very long.
The collection is accessible and well done. But after several poems I tired of reliving this parting. I wanted Sharon to say something terrifically positive, and well had to wait for it.
The triumph is certainly allowing readers to live through her emotions as she grows accustomed to be without her husband. We learn a lot about him. He ran. He practiced medicine, he left her for a colleague. Good riddance.
February 19, 2016
My favorite collections of poems are ones whose content is full of emptiness, loss, longing for departed intimacy and wistful memories of sex and the perfection of physical love; sparks / fire / consuming / the end, death at each conclusion, a life fully and perfectly lived in a few moments of love.
The acuity of separation and bereavement in this book for a dissolved and disbanded marriage is taut and pulls hard on the reader's compassion and sensitivity; this could be me, probably IS me ... I just don't know it yet. I hope it is not so. But Sharon Olds guides the way through grief with startling maturity and objectivity. It is off-putting in places how well-adjusted she is to the changes of her life.
Then, in other poems, she allows herself selfish emotion and protection from guilt and responsibility.
Although it is an entirely different experience than Donald Hall's Without, Stag's Leap is no less charged with mourning and questions and once-filled spaces now emptied.
I don't know why I love to live in those sorrow soaked places, but Stag's Leap felt like home for me, and it is one of my favorite collections of poetry.
The acuity of separation and bereavement in this book for a dissolved and disbanded marriage is taut and pulls hard on the reader's compassion and sensitivity; this could be me, probably IS me ... I just don't know it yet. I hope it is not so. But Sharon Olds guides the way through grief with startling maturity and objectivity. It is off-putting in places how well-adjusted she is to the changes of her life.
Then, in other poems, she allows herself selfish emotion and protection from guilt and responsibility.
Although it is an entirely different experience than Donald Hall's Without, Stag's Leap is no less charged with mourning and questions and once-filled spaces now emptied.
I don't know why I love to live in those sorrow soaked places, but Stag's Leap felt like home for me, and it is one of my favorite collections of poetry.
February 9, 2013
Wow. Sharon Olds has given the world a rare gift in this book. If you buy one poetry collection this year, make this your choice.
Sharon Olds manages to take her most deeply personal moments, her private pain, and her triumphant re-definition of self and render them as universal touchstones. She speaks to the deeply held emotions we all share and pulls us into her journey. Every poem in this collection has its "A-ha!" moment, where we long to reach out a hand and say, "Yes, I know EXACTLY what you mean." Sharon Olds resurrects herself after a stunning loss, and lets us all know that the journey back to wholeness is survivable. The confessional poets are sometimes held in disdain, I know, for focusing on minutiae or on the too particularly personal...but Sharon Olds renders those arguments obsolete. Male, female, married, unmarried, young or reaching those years of gravitas...none of these labels matter as you read this collection. If you're human and have known love, loss, and moving forward - this book will speak to you.
Sharon Olds manages to take her most deeply personal moments, her private pain, and her triumphant re-definition of self and render them as universal touchstones. She speaks to the deeply held emotions we all share and pulls us into her journey. Every poem in this collection has its "A-ha!" moment, where we long to reach out a hand and say, "Yes, I know EXACTLY what you mean." Sharon Olds resurrects herself after a stunning loss, and lets us all know that the journey back to wholeness is survivable. The confessional poets are sometimes held in disdain, I know, for focusing on minutiae or on the too particularly personal...but Sharon Olds renders those arguments obsolete. Male, female, married, unmarried, young or reaching those years of gravitas...none of these labels matter as you read this collection. If you're human and have known love, loss, and moving forward - this book will speak to you.
October 14, 2018
Gentle, gut-wrenching divorce poems, written with the lucid grief that Sharon Olds seems to so effortlessly own.
“Bruise Ghazal”
Now a black-and-blue oval on my hip has turned blue-
violet as the ink-brand on the husk-fat of a prime
cut, sore as a lovebite, but too
large for a human mouth. I like it, my
flesh brooch—gold rim, envy-color
cameo within, and violet mottle
on which the door-handle that bit is a black
purple with wiggles like trembling decapede
legs. I count back the days, and forward
to when it will go its rot colors and then
slowly fade. Some people think I should
be over my ex by now—maybe
I thought I might have been over him more
by now. Maybe I’m half over who he
was, but not who I thought he was, and not
over the wound, sudden deathblow
as if out of nowhere, though it came from the core
of our life together. Sleep now, Sharon,
sleep. Even as we speak, the work is being
done, within. You were born to heal.
Sleep and dream—but not of his return.
Since it cannot harm him, wound him, in your dream.
May 20, 2013
Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap embodies the worst excesses of confessional poetry - how easily it can turn into an exercise in banal narcissism. There is an R.S. Thomas poem where he responds to a set of poems from an amateur poet saying "I understand why you wrote them / But why send them to me?". That's exactly how I feel about Stag's Leap. That Ms. Olds needed the cathartic release of these poems after her husband left her is understandable, but to inflict them on the rest of us is frankly inexcusable. A handful of poems about divorce would have been interesting (and there is just about enough good material in the book for, say, five or six poems), but an entire book devoted to that subject seems like pure self-indulgence, and to compare your 'loss' to the pain suffered by those who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks as Ms. Olds does (seriously, I'm not kidding!) is to cross over into bathos.
October 20, 2022
Edit (the next day 10/20): I actually think I'm obnoxious and this is a total 4. Too many poems I enjoyed. And the highs are too high for a 3.5.
_________
3.5
Some really exceptional work in here, but the seasonal sections mainly fell flat for me, and, if a quarter or more of the poems in a collection don't at least leave a minor impact, what is really the point?
Anyway, gorgeously sad poems about divorce, about love's failed promise, about thirty years of marital expectations collapsing, about love's resonances beyond its own original dissolution, about the way memories during relationships become time capsules and then suddenly must become yet more memories to remember in a constant stream of monotonously beautiful reminiscences, about the way a man's hips can seem like sacred gifts, about the way the physical unlocks the emotional and vice versa, and about the irreparable inconceivability of someone who has loved you for thirty years gradually falling away for another.
I loved this in many ways. I think I just love Sharon Olds' confessional voice. She lets you almost too far into her being, both cerebrally and bodily. Like Ernaux, she investigates a bit what it means to be a confessional poet and the manner in which that affects those closest to you, how it would affect someone to become your art object in a way. She is a tad overzealous with archaic diction, but she also has a very strong sense of sound and rhythm, so it feels like it mostly comes from a deep love of language rather than a need to please and perform.
I liked this poem especially:
Last Look
In the last minute of our marriage, I looked into
his eyes. All day until then, I had been
comforting him, for the shock he was in
at his pain—the act of leaving me
took him back, to his own early
losses. But now it was time to go beyond
comfort, to part. And his eyes seemed to me,
still, like the first ocean, wherein
the blue-green algae came into their early
language, his sea-wide iris still
essential, for me, with the depths in which
our firstborn, and then our second, had turned,
on the sides of their tongues the taste buds for the moon-bland
nectar of our milk—our milk. In his gaze,
rooms of the dead; halls of loss; fog-
emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow:
he was in there somewhere, I looked for him,
and he gave me the gift, he let me in,
knowing he would never once, in this world or in
any another, have to do it again,
and I saw him, not as he really was, I was
still without the strength of anger, but I
saw him see me, even now
that dropping down into trust's affection
in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet,
and I said, Good-bye, and he said, Good-bye,
and I closed my eyes, and rose up out of the
passenger seat in a spiral like someone
coming up out of a car gone off a
bridge into deep water. And two and
three Septembers later, and even
the September after that, that September in New York,
I was glad I had looked at him. And when I
told a friend how glad I'd been,
she said, Maybe it's like with the families
of the dead, even the families of those
who died in the Towers—that need to see
the body, no longer inhabited
by what made them the one we loved—somehow
it helps to say good-bye to the actual,
and I saw, again, how blessed my life has been,
first, to have been able to love,
then, to have the parting now behind me,
and not to have lost him when the kids were young,
and the kids now not at all to have lost him,
and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have
lost someone who could have loved me for life.
I will very much look forward to reading more Olds.
p.s. Goodreads' text formatting is totally obnoxious. moon-bland should be on the same line in the poem, but there is no way to fit it nor does there seem to be a way to indent a line to at least make that clear. Alas.
_________
3.5
Some really exceptional work in here, but the seasonal sections mainly fell flat for me, and, if a quarter or more of the poems in a collection don't at least leave a minor impact, what is really the point?
Anyway, gorgeously sad poems about divorce, about love's failed promise, about thirty years of marital expectations collapsing, about love's resonances beyond its own original dissolution, about the way memories during relationships become time capsules and then suddenly must become yet more memories to remember in a constant stream of monotonously beautiful reminiscences, about the way a man's hips can seem like sacred gifts, about the way the physical unlocks the emotional and vice versa, and about the irreparable inconceivability of someone who has loved you for thirty years gradually falling away for another.
I loved this in many ways. I think I just love Sharon Olds' confessional voice. She lets you almost too far into her being, both cerebrally and bodily. Like Ernaux, she investigates a bit what it means to be a confessional poet and the manner in which that affects those closest to you, how it would affect someone to become your art object in a way. She is a tad overzealous with archaic diction, but she also has a very strong sense of sound and rhythm, so it feels like it mostly comes from a deep love of language rather than a need to please and perform.
I liked this poem especially:
Last Look
In the last minute of our marriage, I looked into
his eyes. All day until then, I had been
comforting him, for the shock he was in
at his pain—the act of leaving me
took him back, to his own early
losses. But now it was time to go beyond
comfort, to part. And his eyes seemed to me,
still, like the first ocean, wherein
the blue-green algae came into their early
language, his sea-wide iris still
essential, for me, with the depths in which
our firstborn, and then our second, had turned,
on the sides of their tongues the taste buds for the moon-bland
nectar of our milk—our milk. In his gaze,
rooms of the dead; halls of loss; fog-
emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow:
he was in there somewhere, I looked for him,
and he gave me the gift, he let me in,
knowing he would never once, in this world or in
any another, have to do it again,
and I saw him, not as he really was, I was
still without the strength of anger, but I
saw him see me, even now
that dropping down into trust's affection
in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet,
and I said, Good-bye, and he said, Good-bye,
and I closed my eyes, and rose up out of the
passenger seat in a spiral like someone
coming up out of a car gone off a
bridge into deep water. And two and
three Septembers later, and even
the September after that, that September in New York,
I was glad I had looked at him. And when I
told a friend how glad I'd been,
she said, Maybe it's like with the families
of the dead, even the families of those
who died in the Towers—that need to see
the body, no longer inhabited
by what made them the one we loved—somehow
it helps to say good-bye to the actual,
and I saw, again, how blessed my life has been,
first, to have been able to love,
then, to have the parting now behind me,
and not to have lost him when the kids were young,
and the kids now not at all to have lost him,
and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have
lost someone who could have loved me for life.
I will very much look forward to reading more Olds.
p.s. Goodreads' text formatting is totally obnoxious. moon-bland should be on the same line in the poem, but there is no way to fit it nor does there seem to be a way to indent a line to at least make that clear. Alas.
December 28, 2012
The night after a friend recommended Sharon Olds to me, I found her newest collection at a bookstore. Of its background I knew nothing and, to be honest, if I had been aware that these poems detail the dissolution of a thirty-year marriage, I might have kept my distance. It's been that kind of year. Many of these pieces do cut so close to the bone that the act of reading becomes uncomfortable, almost painful. And yet they're beautiful: Olds allows us to bear witness to her own changing emotions in the face of betrayal, loss and abandonment. She shares her strength and her weakness. Instead of recriminations or platitudes, she gives us uncertainty, distance, hope. She wants so badly to emerge from this experience wiser, unbroken, more alive that I can't help but respect her and seek more of her words. I disagree with the reviewer who described Stag's Leap as detached; no, these poems beautifully convey the complex, often unbearable tide that washes up with heartbreak, bringing with it the ugliest, most exquisite emotional flotsam and jetsam. I'm both sorry and fiercely glad that so many of these works resonate with me, that I can appreciate just how much attachment — and release — they contain.
I am traveling and my suitcase is full, so this book will go to others who will appreciate it. But first I have to record some of my favorite parts.
I am traveling and my suitcase is full, so this book will go to others who will appreciate it. But first I have to record some of my favorite parts.
I am so ashamed
before my friends — to be known to be left
by the one who supposedly knew me best,
each hour is a room of shame, and I am
swimming, swimming, holding my head up,
smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,
like being naked with the clothed, or being
a child, having to try to behave
while hating the terms of your life. In me now
there's a being of sheer hate, like an angel
of hate. On the badminton lawn, she got
her one shot, pure as an arrow,
while through the eyelets of my blouse the no-see-ums
bit the flesh no one seems now
to care to touch.
(from "Known to Be Left")
Approaching Godthåb
So much had become so connected to him
that it seemed to belong to him, so that now,
flying, for hours, above the Atlantic
still felt like being over his realm.
And then, in the distance, a sort of land —
rows and rows of tilted, ruched-back
pyramids and fangs of snow —
appeared, and along its bitten hems, in the
water, hundreds of giant, white
beings, or rafts, nuzzled the shore,
moon-calves, stoats, dories, ships,
tankers green-shadowed cream, a family
of blossom-tree icebergs, his familiars — never
mine, but once contiguous to what I felt was almost mine,
they were like the flowers a boreal storybook
king would give his queen, hoarfrost
lilies. It struck cold awe to my heart,
now, to look at who I had been
who had thought it impossible
that he or I could touch another.
Tu wit, tu woo — lhude sing
goddamn, cuckoo, to look back
and see myself living, vowblind, in cloud
cuckold land. The glacierscape called it
up, the silent, shining tulle,
the dreaming hats and cubes, the theorems
and corollaries, that girl who had thought
a wedding promise was binding as a law
of physics. Now, I stood outside
the kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera,
the emerald-sided frozen plenty,
as if, when he took his stones and went home, he took
snow, and ice, and glaciers, and shores,
and the sea, and the northern hemisphere,
half of the great blue-and-white aggie
itself, I sat on the air above it
and looked down on its uninhabitable beauty.
Tiny Siren
And it had been a year since I had stood,
looking down, into the Whirlpool
in the laundry nook of our August rental, not
sure what I was seeing — it looked like a girl
brought up in a net with fish. It was
a miniature woman, in a bathing suit,
lying back after the spin cycle —
the photograph of a woman, slightly
shaped over the contours of a damp towel.
I drew it out — radiant square
from some other world — maybe the daughter
of the owners of the house. And yet it looked like
someone we knew — I said, to my husband,
This was in with the sheets and towels.
Good heavens, he said. Where?! In
with the sheets and your running shorts. Doesn't it
look like your colleague? We gazed at the smile
and the older shapely body in its gleaming
rainbow sheath — surprise trout
of wash-day. An hour later, he found me,
and told me she had given him the picture
the day they went running together
when I was away, he must have slipped it in
his pocket, he was so shocked to see it
again, he did not know what to say.
In a novel, I said, this would be when
the wife should worry — is there even the slightest
reason to worry. He smiled at me,
and took my hand, and turned to me,
and said, it seemed not by rote,
but as if it were a physical law
of the earth, I love you. And we made love,
and I felt so close to him — I had not
known he knew how to lie, and his telling me
touched my heart. Just once, later
in the day, I felt a touch seasick, as if
a deck were tilting under me —
a run he'd taken, not mentioned in our home,
a fisher of men in the washing machine.
Just for a few minutes I had felt a little nervous.
What precision of action
it had taken, for the bodies to hurtle through
the sky for so long without harming each other.
(from "Crazy")
The Shore
And when I was nearing the ocean, for the first
time since we'd parted —
approaching that place where the liquid stillborn
robe pulls along pulverized boulder —
that month, each year, came back, when we'd swim,
first thing, then go back to bed, to the kelp-field, our
green hair pouring into each other's green
hair of skull and crux bone. We were like
a shore, I thought — two elements, touching
each other, dozing in the faith that we were
knowing each other, one of us
maybe a little too much a hunter,
the other a little too polar of affection,
polar of summer mysteriousness,
magnetic in reticent mourning. His first
mate was a husky pup, who died,
from the smoke, in a fire. Someone asked him,
once, to think from the point of view
of the flames, and his face relaxed, and he said,
Delicious. I hope he can come to think
of me like that. The weeks before he left,
I'd lie on him, as if not heavy,
for a minute, after the last ferocious
ends of the world, as if loneliness had come
overland to its foreshore, breaker,
shelf, trench, and then had fallen down to where
it seemed it could not be recovered from. Elements,
protect him, and those we love, whether we both
love them or not. Physics, author of our
death, stand by us. Compass, we are sinking
down through sea-purse toward eyes on stalks.
We have always been going back, since birth,
back toward not being alive. Doing it —
it — with him, I felt I shared
a dignity, and inhuman sweetness
of his sisters and brothers the cieberg calf,
the snow ant, the lighthouse rook,
the albatross, who once it breaks out of the
shell, and rises, does not set down again.
And it
entered my strictured heart, this morning,
slightly, shyly as if warily,
untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness
and plenty of his ongoing life,
unknown to me, unseen by me,
unheard by me, untouched by me,
but known by others, seen by others,
heard, touched. And it came to me,
for moments at a time, moment after moment,
to be glad for him that he is with the one
he feels was meant for him.
(from "September 2001, New York City")
What Left?
Something like a half-person
left my young husband's body,
and something like the other half
left my ovary. Later,
the new being, complete, slowly
left my body. And a portion of breath
left the air of the delivery room,
entering the little mouth,
and the milk left the breasts, and went
into the fat cuffs of the wrists.
Years later, during his cremation,
the liquids left my father's corpse,
and the smoke left the flue. And even
later, my mother's ashes left
my hand, and fell as seethe into the salt
chop. My then husband made
a self, a life, I made beside him
a self, a life,gestation. We grew
strong, in direction. We clarified
in vision, we deepened in our silence and our speaking.
We did not hold still, we moved, we are moving
still — we made, with each other, a moving
like a kind of music: duet, then solo,
solo. We fulfilled something in each other —
I believed in him, he believed in me, then we
grew, and grew, I grieved him, he grieved me,
I completed with him, he completed with me, we
made whole cloth together, we succeeded,
we perfect what lay between him and me,
I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me,
I did not leave him, he did not leave me,
I freed him, he freed me.
December 26, 2019
Reading Stag's Leap left me in a quiet place, deeply moved and struggling to find the right adjectives to describe my experience of these poems: gorgeous, heartbreaking, raw, compelling, erotic, mundane, bittersweet, ribald, compassionate, profound...
Sharon Olds won the Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot Prize for this incredible collection of poems about the end of her marriage and the exit wounds of her divorce, after her husband of 30 years left her for another woman. You would imagine bitterness and anger, but instead the poems read more like love letters. Even as she tries to reframe her loss as a decision made by the two of them, it is clear that she is still mourning his absence, unable to truly let go.
In Not Quiet Enough, she writes:
I wonder if my husband left me
because I was not quiet enough in bed.
...he seemed content with me, he seemed to like
anything, any screak or high C, but were there
brayings that graded through off-key shimmer into
prism of bruise-color, were there
mortal laments, mammal shrieks against
division, as if, in sex, we practice
the cauter of being parted."
Authors who write novels have hundreds of pages to set the stage, create fully realized characters, and allow the arc of their story to unfold. Poets must accomplish all of that in just a page or two, so each word, each pause, each period matters. While I did not love every poem in the collection, each one is a richly imagined story in miniature. The depth and breadth that Olds can convey in a single poem is staggering. From Chagall's floating bridegroom to phrenology to the Hadron collider, she gathers diverse concepts and spins the threads into a coherent tapestry.
While told from a woman's point of view, I think these poems have a universal appeal. We have all been left by a loved one at some time, curled into ourselves, howling and bereft. The difference is that Olds does not hide her doubt, her pain, her scars. She turns them into art. And her readers are so very fortunate that she has done so.
Sharon Olds won the Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot Prize for this incredible collection of poems about the end of her marriage and the exit wounds of her divorce, after her husband of 30 years left her for another woman. You would imagine bitterness and anger, but instead the poems read more like love letters. Even as she tries to reframe her loss as a decision made by the two of them, it is clear that she is still mourning his absence, unable to truly let go.
In Not Quiet Enough, she writes:
I wonder if my husband left me
because I was not quiet enough in bed.
...he seemed content with me, he seemed to like
anything, any screak or high C, but were there
brayings that graded through off-key shimmer into
prism of bruise-color, were there
mortal laments, mammal shrieks against
division, as if, in sex, we practice
the cauter of being parted."
Authors who write novels have hundreds of pages to set the stage, create fully realized characters, and allow the arc of their story to unfold. Poets must accomplish all of that in just a page or two, so each word, each pause, each period matters. While I did not love every poem in the collection, each one is a richly imagined story in miniature. The depth and breadth that Olds can convey in a single poem is staggering. From Chagall's floating bridegroom to phrenology to the Hadron collider, she gathers diverse concepts and spins the threads into a coherent tapestry.
While told from a woman's point of view, I think these poems have a universal appeal. We have all been left by a loved one at some time, curled into ourselves, howling and bereft. The difference is that Olds does not hide her doubt, her pain, her scars. She turns them into art. And her readers are so very fortunate that she has done so.
February 19, 2024
I read this with literally no context - I checked out a half dozen books from the library with the word "leap" in the title, read a few pages, decided I was bored, sent it back, etc etc until this one.
It's a poetry collection detailing the thoughts/feelings/aftermath of the author, whose husband announced he's leaving her for another woman. This was almost written in real-time, and so many parts of it surprised me: mainly, that she spends the majority of the time still absolutely in love with him. That was more heart-twisting than her processing her anger.
Occasionally she would drop a line like a shot across the bow. Sometimes she would use words or ideas so convoluted I almost had to laugh.
Overall, a worthwhile experience! And I'm grateful to have read this instead of the 19 self-help/business books with "leap" in the title.
PopSugar 2024: a book with leap in the title
It's a poetry collection detailing the thoughts/feelings/aftermath of the author, whose husband announced he's leaving her for another woman. This was almost written in real-time, and so many parts of it surprised me: mainly, that she spends the majority of the time still absolutely in love with him. That was more heart-twisting than her processing her anger.
Occasionally she would drop a line like a shot across the bow. Sometimes she would use words or ideas so convoluted I almost had to laugh.
Overall, a worthwhile experience! And I'm grateful to have read this instead of the 19 self-help/business books with "leap" in the title.
PopSugar 2024: a book with leap in the title
July 27, 2021
damn what a breakup book. visceral, grief as tangible objects, snapshots of a body, holding onto a body, sometimes sensual, sometimes funny, stained with a life. sharon olds untangles her marriage from her view, untangles two strangers. gossip diary poems at their finest, beautiful and wise and so strange: "one sunrise-milk-green boot of the dead, which i wore, as i dreamed." felt good to read this in one sitting, my hair still wet from the shower, my skin prickling.
October 26, 2022
I didn't expect to enjoy this so much, but it's just banger after banger
January 13, 2024
one of my favorite poetry collections ever
December 3, 2023
this deserves 100 pages praise & bows & glitter throwing & devout kneeling & slumping to the floor in awe which i'd like to insert here conceptually/ formally until one day i'm not dying in work xxx
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