Sharon Olds: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 1970s, 1980s, 2000s, 2023]

Sharon Olds (1942–present) was raised, she has said, as a “hellfire Calvinist,” an upbringing that perhaps led to her embrace of the taboo and the autobiographical, especially in her poetry. Olds’s “emotionally scathing” poetry, collected in works including Balladz (2022), Arias (2019), and Stag’s Leap (2012), has earned her numerous recognitions, including the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Olds’s National Book Critics Circle Award–winning volume The Dead and the Living (1984) has sold more than 50,000 copies, ranking it as one of contemporary poetry’s best-selling volumes.

To read a Sharon Olds poem is to peer into some first instance of creation: to see that spark that must have been both the inevitable beginning and ending of all life. A few elements come together—crash together, really—forming one thing that is the root of all things. Call it love. Call it our humanity.

—from “Admit a Secret: On Sharon Olds,” by Camille Dungy, published in Poetry, April 2023

Sharon Olds’s selected poems in order of publication

1970s

“The Guild” (1978)

This was his son, who sat, an apprentice,
night after night…
…and he learned 
the craft of oblivion

In just two images—which sit together in the poem, almost identical in length, though, like the father to the grandfather in the poem, the one that follows surpasses the first—Olds’s speaker depicts the origin of her personal fire, a family history of alcoholism that stoked its other history of abuse. Many words and images reappear, often quickly after one another, like a glass brought again and again to the mouth: fire, eye, young, night, coals, drank, tree, cruelty, oblivion, and father. With the father positioned as an “apprentice” with a face “unlined” like paper, the poem can also be considered an ars poetica in which, through her own steady craft, Olds extinguishes the patriarch’s titular guild and chooses, instead, the writers’ guild for her own.

1980s

“Satan Says” (1980)

Satan
comes to me in the locked box
and says, I’ll get you out. Say
My father is a shit.

The very first in her debut collection, this titular poem introduces one of Olds’s cardinal predicaments: the past’s confinement of the present. It also boldly announces the taboo as a poetic tool Olds became known for. Desperate for escape, the poem knocks initially against its own walls, box and cedar repeated so often as a line’s start or end before the scene zooms out that readers see the child’s box in both its room and emotional context. Redolent of Dickinson’s line “And then a Plank in Reason, broke,” the speaker can break free of “the pain of the locked past” by repeating Satan’s directives, here in italics, disavowing her parents in increasingly illicit ways. But to leave without acknowledging love means entering yet another trap. Beside her in the box, the ballerina pin’s “ruby eye” acts as counterpart to a destructive fire, warming and illuminating as it burns. Disavowal and devotion, irreverence and reverence—Olds enters her oeuvre with this debut by insisting she can have both.

2000s

“Still Life” (2005)

At moments almost thinking of her, I was

moving through the still life show while my mother

had her stroke.

An inventively ekphrastic poem, “Still Life” places the speaker so thoroughly among the minute details of paintings as to be almost inside them, while her mother, elsewhere, suffers a stroke. Although their emotional interaction with objects is different, the mother is similarly attentive to the particularity of things, with a strict opinion about how to cut a banana. By the poem’s end, the speaker moves, like moving from painting to painting or detail to detail, toward identification with the mother, an apple not much “farther from the tree,” and holds, in memory, herself and her mother together in a mirror gilded like a painting’s frame.

“Poem Which Talks Back to Itself” (2018)

Shut
your mouth. Put down your pen. Drop
your weapon! Stop! In the name of the law
and the prophets.

Etan Patz, a six-year-old, was kidnapped in 1979 on his way to a bus stop in New York City. He was never found. Olds’s poem appeared in the August 2018 issue of Poetry magazine after Pedro Hernandez’s 2017 conviction for Patz’s abduction and murder, and the poem grapples with Patz’s story and with the telling of Patz’s story. The speaker cannot bring herself to utter that word that would confirm the child’s fate—murderer—careful to use only the most removed language: “someone/ who saw their son,” “someone/in custody,” “the one taken in for questioning.” Each time the speaker’s imagination begins to fill in the scene’s details with a basement, a truck, or a landfill—“the dear matter—don’t—” she stops herself, the italicized phrases often both warnings to the self and pleas to Hernandez to not harm the child, not for Hernandez’s sake but for Patz’s parents and for all parents who bear a child into a world of unbearable violence.

From the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner folio in Poetry magazine, April 2023

“Apology” (2023)

I kill animals. I have
done it all my life—

Although the title suggests otherwise, like Lucille Clifton’s cruelty, this speaker approaches her animal violence—here, mice killed to protect a bird feeder—matter-of-factly. The mouse deaths are simply a fact of her own life. With sonic and sensory images of the dead mice “like a pattern repeat/on a baby-crib sheet” and, an Olds classic, imagining her own conception as a “larder of eggs” “sent […] to hunt a sperm,” Olds suggests that the death of the mice is a fact of all life, as birth is a fact of life, her own lineage breeding a list of fathers, mothers, and daughters as endless as that pile of mice, just as “astonish[ed] to be” dead as they were to be living.

“To You, from Your Secret Admirer” (2023)

I love the conversations we have
after making love—of course it’s just me, making
love to myself, talking to you,
loving you—

In this love poem, the you is unabashedly ambiguous; perhaps the self, perhaps another, the admired is the poem’s little secret. As the speaker masturbates, her love ripples outward from her body to the you, to the senses themselves, and to semen, her euphoria expanding until it seems the whole world could be her you. From speaking to moaning to screaming, knowledge for the speaker comes through communicating, with touch another way to talk. Why not speak with song? With a nod to The Five Satins famous doo-wop “In the Still of the Night,” Olds rides pleasure itself into an unpunctuated end.

“Mathematical Love Poem, with a Proof” (2023)

“It’s a different world,” he said,
“I dreamed numbers.”

Proofs are arguments that guarantee mathematical conclusions. Here, the conclusion is love. Recounting a drive to the airport, the speaker reconfirms her feelings for her beloved, Carl. Because Carl can sometimes feel insulted unexpectedly, the speaker needs to be calculated in her expressions. She loves him on his terms by asking him a question about math, which he studied. And, just as a poem happens line by line, “sentence/by sentence,” he answers her. Asking the question is proof of her love; his answer is his own. The poem, in combining her form with his content, the lyric with the mathematical, becomes its own proof, “a song made of numbers.”