The Wellspring

Description

A bold and intimate collection from the winner of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize and one of America's most popular poets. Over the last five years, Sharon Olds' poetry has become widely read and celebrated in Britain. Frank and exhilarating, sensual and profound, the poems stare, unblinking, at sex and death and love - showing these things to us in all their raw beauty. This striking new collection is a sequence of poems that reaches into the very wellspring of life. The poems take us back to the womb, to childhood, to a searing sexual awakening, to the shock of birth, the wonder and humour of parenthood - and finally to the depths of adult love. Always bold, musical and honest, The Wellspring plunges us into the essence of experience. This is a highly charged, sinuous, passionate book from one of the finest poets writing today.

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.

Sentences roll on with breathless urgency, and the emotional pace of these unstoppered utterances is remarkably effective... Visceral in detail and unsparingly honest in its psychology, the volume offers a tenderness and integrity which allow even the more shockingly erotic or confessional moments to say something about innocence * Guardian * Sharon Olds' poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the toughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss -- Michael Ondaatje Her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive. She sees description as a means to catharsis, and the result is impossible to forget...her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism and its power to move -- David Leavitt 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