| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in One Secret Thing for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
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.
The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his
first rotation in the emergency room.
On the ancient boarding-school radio,
in the attic hall, the announcer had given my
boyfriend's name as one of two
brought to the hospital after the sunrise
service, the egg-hunt, the crash - one of them
critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the
stairwell banisters, at their lathing,
the necks and knobs like joints and bones,
the varnish here thicker here thinner - I had said
Which one of them died, and now the world was
an ant's world: the huge crumb of each
second thrown, somehow, up onto
my back, and the young, tired voice
said my fresh love's name.
(from 'Easter 1960')
About the Author
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
I loved this collection of her most moving poems.I bought this after seeing her at Snape this summer, and to hear her read her own words was just breathtaking. I felt like I had been thumped in the heart, her words are sweetly poignant, and universally touching.
Be in a quiet place, where you can savour every word when you read this book, and prepare to be profoundly moved, to tears, to joy, and to what it is to be human.
Sharon Olds has found such dignity in past books - and some of her poems are oustanding. The danger is that such poetry may become self-referential. There can be narcissism in contemplating one's own nose pickings. She has not escaped this curse fully this time.
Few artists have tackled successfully the theme of mental and physical decay. Ferdinand Hodler's obsessive sketches of his wife's dying face, as she lay ravaged by terminal cancer, say more about life and love than Renoir's fragrant, and in the end vacuously repetitive portraits of youth.
The last days of Olds' mother are the theme of numerous poems in the later part of this book. It is a difficult theme, for all to esily the living betray the breaking babble of the parting to settle personal accounts. The poem that gives the title to the collection ends with the line: "...my last chance to free myself". Way too much `I'.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
