Stag's Leap: Poems Author: Sharon Olds | Language: English | ISBN:
B007MGSYAS | Format: PDF
Stag's Leap: Poems Description
In this wise and intimate new book, Sharon Olds tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.
As she carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending, 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; the radical change in her sense of place in the world. 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 she has yet given us.
- File Size: 794 KB
- Print Length: 114 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: B009IICPA8
- Publisher: Knopf (September 4, 2012)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B007MGSYAS
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,636 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Contemporary - #31
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > American - #51
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships > Family Relationships > Divorce
- #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Contemporary - #31
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > American - #51
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships > Family Relationships > Divorce
I have been a fan of Sharon Olds since a copy of "Satan Says" leapt from a used bookstore shelf and into my college backpack, and lived there for the better part of a year. As I continued to explore her work through her numerous books, I fell in love with her poetry, how it balances the hard and soft of life. I loved how her sharp, perceptive mind was balanced and embellished by a sensual, love-drunk heart.
Her poems about her husband were some of the most tender and authentic writing about adult committed relationships that I'd ever experienced. Her poetry grew to be an enormous influence on me as both a writer and a woman, and I know that I am not alone in that. When news of Olds's divorce became public, I remember gasping out loud in shock. I had read and reread her poems so much, that I remembered their details of their thirty year long marriage almost as if it was my own. I felt guilty about how I immediately craved to read her poetry about the subject, to see how her mind was processing what seemed so impossible to me.
Fifteen years later, "Stag's Leap" tells the story of this harrowing time in Olds's life. From the first poem "While He Told Me" (which explores with heart-breaking detail the evening her husband told he wanted a divorce, while her eyes darted "from small thing / to small thing, in our room, the face / of the bedside clock, the sepia postcard / of a woman bending down to a lily") to the last poem "What Left" (where she stares back at the fifteen years of cleaving, and the years proceeding it, with marvelous strength and clarity), Olds creates a masterwork of love and loss.
Delicate, intimate and un-self-conscious, Olds explores the landscape of the new world she is stunned to find herself.
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.
Stag's Leap: Poems Preview
Link
Please Wait...