Sharon Olds

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.

Poems

Stag's Leap

Emiley Jones

[…] Something / has died, inside me, believing that, / like the death of a crone in one twin bed / as a child is born in the other. Have faith, / old heart. What is living, anyway, / but dying.

 […] Uneven, uneven, our scales / of contentment went slowly askew, and when he / hopped off, on the ground floor, and I / sailed through the air, poetic justice / was done.

[…] And then there is the spring park, / damp as if freshly peeled, sweet / greenhouse, green cemetery with no / dead in it except, in some shaded / woods, under some years of leaves and / rotted cones, the body of a warbler / like a whole note fallen from the sky—my old / love for him, like a songbird's rib cage picked clean.

[…] 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.

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—

Stag's Leap quotes

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