Blood, Tin, Straw

Description

The new collection from the major prize-winning poet. Sharon Olds divides this new book into five sections - 'Blood', 'Tin', ' 'Straw', ' 'Fire' and 'Light' - each made up of fourteen poems whose dominant imagery is drawn from one of these elements. The poems are rooted in different moments of an ordinary life and weave back and forth in time. Each section suggests the progression of the making of a soul cleansed by blood, forged by fire, suffused by light. Unafraid to confront the ecstatic or the brutal side of a woman's experience, Sharon Olds transforms the subjects with an alchemist's art, using language that is alternately casual and startling, fierce and transcendent. This is an intensely moving collection by one of America's finest poets.

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, educated at Stanford and Columbia universities, and has lived for many years in New York City. Her books have won many awards over the years. Her last collection, Stag's Leap, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. In 2016 she won the Wallace Stevens award for her 'outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry'.

Her sixth book [Blood, Tin, Straw] is without doubt her strongest... Olds' trademark has long been her astonishing candour... and this quality is firmly in place here, but she has added to it a new strength and lyricism of metaphor and image. The shock she delivers is that of true poetry * Library Journal * Olds has always been a daring poet of the flesh, but now in Blood, Tin, Straw, a major work, she embraces the entire universe... Olds writes more forthrightly about female sexuality - the hunger, blood, tensility and heat of it - than any of her sister poets. This collection is poetry as memoir, mined from the very core of her being * Booklist * Olds remains too little-known in the UK... readers new to her will be astounded * Independent * Sharon Olds' poems are pure fire in the hands... 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