One Secret Thing

Description

A stunning collection of poems focusing on the emotions involved in family life from the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humour, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy - sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger - public and private - illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revision, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds's characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.

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.

A memorable collection -- M Wynn Thomas * The Guardian * Sharon Olds's poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the roughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss -- Michael Ondaatje As devastatingly accurate in its depiction of our deepest wishes and secret inner lives as we have come to expect from this brilliant and fearless poet -- Joyce Carol Oates * Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year * 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... Sharon Olds is enormously self-aware; her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism, and its power to move -- David Leavitt She has written without embarassment or apology, with remarkable passion and savagery and nerve, poems about family and family pathology, early erotic fascination and sexual life inside marriage -- Amy Hempel