One Secret Thing
Sharon Olds
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 humour, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy - sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness.
4.2 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Poetry |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
96 |
| RRP |
£10.00 |
| Date of Publication |
March 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-0224087841 |
| Publisher |
Jonathan Cape |
| |
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 humour, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy - sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness.
Reviews
The Guardian
M Wynn Thomas
"[It is] the question of how to be her mother's daughter that most consumes her in this volume. Much of her life, it seems, has been engaged in devising strategies of liberation from that oppressive tie. One of the most remarkable poems in this collection has her metamorphose into a fly on the wall of her Puritan family home: "in each of the hundred / eyes of both of my compound eyes, / one wallpaper rose". It's an astonishing image for the terrible fixity of a pathological obsession... a memorable collection."
21/03/2009
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The Observer
Olivia Laing
"Olds tracks her mother's slow death with loving, horrified precision, and to say that this would be a helpful volume for anyone caught in the conflicting coils of bereavement is not to diminish its power as poetry... Her account of her mother's dead body, "beast-exalted and refreshed", will no doubt be denounced in some quarters as obscene. But her attentiveness to the physical is what gives her work its soulfulness."
08/03/2009
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The Times
Elaine Feinstein
"Sharon Olds...is best known for the candour of her personal revelations... Certainly there are poems dealing with her lonely mother, naked in a bath, and Olds's uneasy pubescence, but the book finds its shape in another kind of war: the struggle against the body's dissolution, the death of flesh, and the consequent importance of a continuity of generations. In the last few lyrics the voice is powerfully literal, with echoes of the Bible, as Olds relinquishes her own past..."
06/02/2009
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The Independent
Christina Patterson
"The images [in the first sequence of poems] are powerful, but it sometimes feels as though Olds can't resist the urge to shock... In the next five sections, she returns to more familiar ground – on which she feels much safer... As always, Olds's glimpses into the secret places of the body sometimes make you gasp. And her portrait of her mother, dying now, vulnerable at last, is tender. To write poetry like this, you need to take risks – and sometimes risks fail."
03/04/2009
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The Financial Times
Natalie Whittle
"The visceral, passionate world of Sharon Olds makes a welcome return with this blistering investigation into pangs of war, family and love. Once again the traumas of Olds’s strict, Calvinist childhood are remembered in lyrical detail, softened here by her desire to forgive."
29/11/2008
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The Sunday Times
Sean O'Brien
"Olds’s undoubted power as a writer is of a piece with intermittent failures of tone and awareness: at bottom, she seems to regard the pursuit of truth as more important than the exercise of art... ['War'] has several examples in which moral reach exceeds imaginative grasp, so that it’s a relief to turn once more to the family matters that most exercise Olds... At her best, as here, Olds stops sounding religiose and insistent, and achieves a state of exalted testimony to mortality"
19/04/2009
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