Sharon Olds


Sharon Olds
* Books of Poetry (alphabetical). * Time Line. * Books.

Sharon Olds featured in:

* Best American Poetry: 2009 (guest editor David Wagoner) with "Red".
* Best American Poetry: 2006 (guest editor Robert Creeley) with "Frontis Nulla Fides".
* Best American Poetry: 2001 (guest editor Robert Hass) with "His Costume".
* Best American Poetry: 1999 (guest editor Robert Bly) with "What It Meant".
* Best American Poetry: 1994 (guest editor A.R. Ammons) with "The Knowing".

Tone

Books of Poetry (alphabetical).








No dedication.

A book of love lost with the end of her long marriage.

One of her finest books. Favorite poems are many and include:

From the cover:

In this wise and intimate telling — which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending — Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband's smile to the set of his hip. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and who now loves another woman. ... As she writes in the remarkable Stag's Leap,

"When anyone escapes, my heart
leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from,
I am half on the side of the leaver."

Data:




Dedication: "For our daughter and son".

A passionate collection in four parts on the four main areas that her poems arise: Her parents; Her adolescence; Her son and daughter; and Her husband. One has to wonder how comfortable her family can be with their appearance in her physically and emotionally explicit poems. But Olds mines her relationship with her dear ones for powerful poems.

The 2012 Stag's Leap subsequently described the breakup of the marriage.

Blog entry.


Time Line

1942.
Born in San Francisco. (Later educated at Stanford University and Columbia University.)

1980.
Published her first collection, Satan Says (1980), for which she won the San Francisco Poetry Center Award.

1983.
Published her second collection, Living and the Dead, (The) (1983), for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award and which was the Lamont Poetry selection for 1983.

1992.
Published Father, (The) (1992), which was short-listed for the T.S.Eliot Prize in England.
Received a three-year writer's award from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund in 1992.

1995.
Published Wellspring, (The) (1995), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

1997.
Published Gold Cell, (The) (1997).

1998.
Named New York State Poet.

1999.
Published Blood, Tin, Straw (1999).

?.
Published Unswept Room, (The) (?).

2004.
Published Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002 (2004).

2008.
Published One Secret Thing (2008).

2012.
Published: Stag's Leap (2012).

2013.
Won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Stag's Leap (2012).

Books

Links and Books.


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