Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

I think Sharon Olds’ acclaimed Stag’s Leap has already been reviewed by a member of this group, but this is my take on it.

I am an admirer of Olds’ work and the book was the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2012 and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize, so I came to it with high expectations.

The poems in the collection chart the emotional progress of the break up of Olds’ thirty year-old marriage and its aftermath. Albeit ultimately redemptive, this is edgy, raw, unashamedly confessional poetry: well crafted, as you would expect from Sharon Olds and, for me, slightly uncomfortable because of the open rawness, the energy and anger in many of the poems and my awareness that she is spilling not only her unwashed life across these pages, but also the lives of her family and, in particular, the ex-husband. Whilst applauding the poems, the sense of voyeurism gives me a sense of unease, but then again, every oyster needs its grain of dirt to shape a pearl.

Olds’ poetry has always been highly confessional, but this time the poet seems more aware of it than in previous collections. There are quite a few poems that breach the fourth wall (in theatrical terms) with Olds repeatedly acknowledging that her poetry is based on her life:

“I didn’t even have an art,
it would come from out of our family’s life –”

and that her husband may not have been comfortable with it:

“- did his spirit turn against the spirit which
tolled our private, wild bell
from the public rooftop, I who had no other
gift to give the world but to hold what I
thought was love’s mirror up to us – ”

Indeed, the penultimate poem of the book, “September 2001, New York City”, begins:

“A week later, I said to a friend: I don’t
think I could ever write about it.
Maybe in a year I could write something.
There is something in me maybe someday
to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
and folded, like a note in school.”

But of course she does write about it, at length and in lyrical, but graphic detail and perhaps this is the source of the discomfort for me.

If you believe, as I do, that the best poetry is made from a balance of intellect and emotion, head and heart, Olds surely achieves this. Her poetry takes her still raw and bleeding emotions from the split and shapes them with the clever intellectual artifice of her craft. My personal preference, however, is for poetry which takes such contrasting extremes and alchemically adjusts them, colouring elements of intellectual control with emotion and controlling the excesses of the emotional outpourings with the craft-strokes of intellect. It seems to be in “Stag’s Leap”, however, that Olds brings to bear her clear, intellectual, analytical gaze on raw, bleeding emotion that is still twitching and screaming and yokes them up, side by side, without either unduly altering the other. It is this striking juxtaposition that makes for very strong poetry, but leaves me feeling both admiration and a little queasy, as if I had witnessed the dissection of a still living frog.

Wow, what a powerful, apt final metaphor, J.S. I hope to eventually read this one myself just to see how it tips my own scales.

You're right that others in this group, both Nina and Caroline, have reviewed this. It's great to have multiple perspectives on a book.

I kinda like that "folded, and folded, and folded" line. It's hard to make that kind of triple repetition work, but it seems effective here.

I enjoyed reading all three reviews of this book.

I really enjoyed this collection