The Unswept Room

Description

From Sharon Olds: a dazzling new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and rhythm, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humour. From poems that erupt out of the traumas of childhood and the painful disconnections between mother and daughter to the nurturing of the poet's own offspring and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical and emotional sensations seldom confronted in poetry. These are poems that strike for the heart, drawing us into her experiences, capturing our imaginations with unexpected word play, sprung rhythms and startling revelations. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us one of her finest collections.

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag's Leap, she is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the winner of many other awards and honours. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of Isidor Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.

Her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive. She sees description as a means to catharsis, and the end result is impossible to forget - her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism, and its power to move -- David Leavitt The attention to line, the superbly focused detail, the way her autobiographical material strikes, shines, deepens, spreads: this, surely, is the sound the confessional hordes have been trying to utter since Lowell, the right road that is missed so easily -- Glyn Maxwell * Times Literary Supplement * Olds remains too little-known in the UK... readers new to her will be astounded -- Kate Clanchy * Independent * If any reading is 'essential', this is it -- Carol Rumens