One Secret Thing

Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony.

The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humor, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy—sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger—public and private—illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds’s characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.

The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his first rotation in the emergency room.
On the ancient boarding-school radio,
in the attic hall, the announcer had given my boyfriend’s name as one of two brought to the hospital after the sunrise service, the egg-hunt, the crash—one of them critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the stairwell banisters, at their lathing,
the necks and knobs like joints and bones,
the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had said
Which one of them died, and now the world was an ant’s world: the huge crumb of each second thrown, somehow, up onto my back, and the young, tired voice said my fresh love’s name.

from “Easter 1960”

In One Secret Thing, her ninth collection, Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems.

The book opens with a poem in twelve parts, which focuses on fearsome images of war. This vision of strife between nations is followed by indelible new poems of conflict within a family. Here are poems of home in which anger, joy, danger, and desire sing together with lyric energy—sometimes comic, sometimes with unblinking forgiveness.

The collection in its entirety is intense and harmonic, moving from minor key to major to minor, and it is rich with a level of self-awareness and irony new in Olds’s work. One Secret Thing is a double portrait, of a child and a difficult parent. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning.

One Secret Thing culminates in a series of elegies of hard-won mourning. Throughout, the poems are shot through with Olds’s characteristic passion, zany imagination, and poetic power.

Publishers Weekly

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.)

Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and was one of the founders of the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. Her work has received the Harriet Monroe Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.