Description
Book SynopsisArguably America's greatest living poet, Sharon Olds enters her eightieth year with a book for our times: a book of fear, fragility and love of life
***NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST***
***AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023***
'Sharon Olds is a force of nature... She proves triumphantly evergreen'
OBSERVER
'At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,' writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating collection, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, followed by her 'Amherst Balladz', honouring Emily Dickinson - 'she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me' - and leads to celebrations of lost friends and lovers: her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together. She examines her white privilege, sees her mother 'flushed and exalted at punishment time', celebrates the human body, even in ageing, and looks with wonder at the natural world and how we've spoiled it.
Renowned for her poetry of searing honesty, sexual frankness and brave originality, Sharon Olds' new book emerges 'at the eleventh hour of the end of the world', from the time of plague, this time of loss, where she can look at the world and her life and tell us plainly 'love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing.'
Trade ReviewIn Balladz, Sharon Olds proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping...
Remarkable. * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *
Perhaps
the most accessible poet of her generation. * Telegraph *
Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so
you will follow wherever she leads...
Olds's artistic signature -
what really makes Sharon Olds Sharon Olds - is a kind of aggressive intimacy: a willingness to write. * New York Times *
Sharon Olds is a force of nature. It seems phenomenal that, at 81, she produced this collection about sex, love and the landscape of the body that seems to have been written with the fearlessness of youth. * Observer, *Books of the Year* *
A brilliant and fearless poet. -- Joyce Carol Oates, author of Black Water
Always fearlessly focused on the body and sensual experience,
Olds getting older just finds new worlds of taboo to conquer... Astonishing. * Sunday Times *
Olds is a supreme poet of the body;
I'll be reading her till I die. -- Fiona Benson, author of Ephemeron
Drawing on an unflinching interrogation of the self,
these poems pulse with energy. * Guardian *
Balladz showcases the range of Sharon Olds... The whole collection follows the fragility of life, the acceptance of aging, and the reckoning of America. * Electric Lit, *Favourite Poetry Collections of 2022* *
