One secret thing

Review by New York Times Review

Admirers of Olds's poems will find more of them in this, her ninth collection. Olds selects intense moments from her family romance - usually ones involving violence or sexuality or both - and then stretches them in opposite directions, rendering them in such obsessive detail that they seem utterly unique to her personal experience, while at the same time using metaphor to insist on their universality. The speaker of "Home Theater, 1955" spends the poem's first nine lines - a full quarter of its total length - describing the skimpy animal-themed bedclothes she wore as a child, then tells the story of a night her father became so violent her sister had to call for police officers, one of whom the speaker remembers glancing at her bare legs. In its final lines, the poem switches in a blink from autobiography to myth: "Soon after our father had struck himself down, / there had risen up these bachelors / beside the sink and stove, and the tiny / mastodons, and bison, and elk, the / beasts on my front and back, began, / atonal, as if around an early fire, to chant." It's a nifty move, but a pretty familiar one - Olds has been making it for almost 30 years and in this book it's too often too easy to see the epiphanies coming. When in the first lines of "Animal Dress" the poet's daughter puts on her mother's black sweater "with maroon creatures / knitted in," you can tell you're in for another Joseph Campbell moment in the poem's final lines, and sure enough.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* An audacious virtuoso, Olds shares perceptions so archaic they predate consciousness and tells of dark deeds worthy of Greek myths transpiring in an otherwise ordinary middle-class, mid-twentieth-century American household. What makes her work so potent is her countering of the shock and shiver of her baroquely bloody revelations with poetic structures so refined and sturdy, they have something of the Shaker about them, minus, of course, the celibacy. Olds is a moralist, and she does believe in confession, in expiation, as long as it is contained in clean-lined, well-keeled vessels. In another breathtaking collection, Olds begins with War, a portrait gallery of the displaced, the maimed, and the cruel, iconic poems as haunting as paintings by Goya. She then extends her long series on family trauma, writing with chilling restraint of moments of malevolent selfishness, brutality, and weirdness. But Olds also writes with tremendous assertion about a tormented girl's revenge as she comes into womanhood, and here Olds sees her fierce mother gentled by age and illness, their terrible adversity canceled as death nears. This is a pivotal collection, and Olds signals a sea change in moments of gleeful self-mockery and resounding catharsis.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The ninth outing from Olds (Blood, Tin, Straw) should again please the many admirers of her raw, vivid and often explicit poems, but might surprise few of them--until the end. As in all her books, Olds works in a demotic free verse, driven by rough enjambments and shocking comparisons: she devotes much of her energy (three of five sections here) to sex, remembered pain and parenthood--the dramatic, abusive household in which she grew up and her tender relationship with her own daughter. Olds depicts the traumas of her first decades with undeniable, if occasionally cartoonish, force: "When I think of people who kill and eat people,/ I think of how lonely my mother was." Olds can also offer high-volume poetry of public protest, as in the set of sonnet-sized poems against war with which the book begins. What seems new here are Olds's reactions to her mother's last years, and to her mother's death. On an antidepressant, briefly "adorable," and then in failing health, "my mother sounds like me,/ the way I sound to myself--one/ who doesn't know, who fails and hopes." Both the failures and the hopes find here a voice that takes them seriously. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Anyone familiar with the work of the award-winning Olds (e.g., The Unswept Room) knows that she is one of those rare poets who can take the everyday and make it sing. What's missing in the opening pages of this work is the very fierce and individual detail in relentless flow that characterizes her best work; the first section, called "War," is surprisingly bland and anonymous. Olds hits her stride--and sounds more like her old self--in the following four sections, detailing a strained and complex mother-daughter relationship over time. Some lines jump out--"When I think of people who kill and eat people/ I think how lonely my mother was"--and homey details are effectively used throughout. But sometimes the revelations aren't so revelatory--"girl of a mother, mother of a girl"--and leaps from space heaters to the spirit's healing are a stretch. Not always satisfying but this is, ultimately, Olds, and contemporary poetry collections should add for completeness.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Diagnosis By the time I was six months old, she knew something was wrong with me. I got looks on my face she had not seen on any child in the family, or the extended family, or the neighborhood. My mother took me in to the pediatrician with the kind hands, a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel: Hub Long. My mom did not tell him what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed. It was just these strange looks on my face-- he held me, and conversed with me, chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother said, She's doing it now! Look! She's doing it now! and the doctor said, What your daughter has is called a sense of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me back to the house where that sense would be tested and found to be incurable. When Our Firstborn Slept In My breasts hardening with milk--little seeps leaking into the folded husband hankies set into the front curves of the nursing harness--I would wander around the quiet apartment when her nap would last a little longer than usual. When she was awake, I was purpose, I was a soft domestic prowling of goodness--only when she slept was I free to think the thoughts of one in bondage. I had wanted to be someone--not just someone's mom, but someone, some one. Yet I know that this work that I did with her lay at the heart of what mattered to me--was that heart. And still there was a part of me left out by it, as if exposed on a mountain by mothering. And when she slept in, I smelled the husks of olive rind on that slope, I heard the blue knock of the eucalyptus locket nut, I tasted the breath of the wolf seeking the flesh to enrich her milk, I saw the bending of the cedar under the sea of the wind--while she slept, it was as if my pierced ankles loosed themselves and I walked like a hunter in the horror-joy of the unattached. Girl of a mother, mother of a girl, I paced, listening, almost part-fearing, sometimes, that she might have stopped breathing, knowing nothing was anything, for me, next to the small motions as she woke, light and wind on the face of the water. And then that faint cry, like a pelagic bird, who sleeps in flight, and I would turn, pivot on a spice-crushing heel, and approach her door. Calvinist Parents Sometime during the Truman Administration, Sharon Olds's parents tied her to a chair, and she is still writing about it. --review of The Unswept Room My father was a gentleman, and he expected us to be gentlemen. If we did not observe the niceties of etiquette he whopped us with his belt. He had a strong arm, and boy did we feel it. --Prescott Sheldon Bush, brother to a president and uncle to another They put roofs over our heads. Ours was made of bent tiles, so the edge of the roof had a broken look, as if a lot of crockery had been thrown down, onto the home-- a dump for heaven's cheap earthenware. Along the eaves, the arches were like entries to the Colosseum where a lion might appear, or an eight-foot armored being with the painted face of a simpering lady. Bees would not roost in those concave combs, above our rooms, birds not swarm. How does a young 'un pay for room and board? They put a roof over our heads, against lightning, and droppings--no foreign genes, no outside gestures, no unfamilial words; and under that roof, they labored as they had been labored over, they beat us into swords. One Secret Thing One secret thing happened at the end of my mother's life, when I was alone with her. I knew it should happen-- I knew someone was there, in there, something less unlike my mother than anything else on earth. And the jar was there on the table, the space around it pulled back from it, like the awestruck handmade air around the crèche, and her open mouth was parched. It was late. The lid eased off. I watched my finger draw through the jelly, its egg-sex essence, the four corners of the room were not creatures, were not the four winds of the earth, if I did not do this, what was I--I rubbed the cowlick of petrolatum on the skin around where the final measures of what was almost not breath swayed, and her throat made a guttural creek bed sound, like pebbly relief. But each lip was stuck by chap to its row of teeth, stuck fast. And then I worked for my motherhood, my humanhood, I slid my forefinger slowly back and forth, along the scab-line and underlying canines and incisors, upper lip and then lower lip, until, like a basted seam, softly ripped, what had been joined was asunder, I ran the salve inside the folds, along the gums, common mercy. The secret was how deeply I did not want to touch inside her, and how much the act was an act of escape, my last chance to free myself. Excerpted from One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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