Overview
Sharon Olds
“Like Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression.”
—The New York Times
Praised for her “vigorous and fecund metaphorical imagination” (American Book Review), celebrated poet Sharon Olds is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, including her latest, Odes. Her numerous awards include the 2014 Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry; the T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Stag’s Leap; and the Lamont Poetry Selection and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead and the Living. Olds is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
From Sea- Level Elegy
. . .Once, each summer, I howl,
and draw myself back, out of there, where
desire and joy, where ignorance, where
touch and the ideal, where unwilled, yet willful
blindness—once a year, I have mercy,
I let myself go down where I have lived, and then,
hand over hand, I pull myself back up.
From Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds© 2015, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Used with permission.