Strike Sparks : Selected Poems, 1980-2002
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Paperback
Recommended By
Nic Sebastian and melissad75.
Book Details
Written by Sharon Olds.
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($17.95)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
A powerful collection from one of our most gifted and widely read poets-117 of her finest poems drawn from her seven published volumes.Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds's poetry "pure fire in the hands" and cheered the "roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss." This rich selection exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited-the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfillment of marriage, the wonder of children-but each recasting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits.
Strike Sparks is a testament to this remarkable poet's continuing and amazing growth.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Nic Sebastian did not give this book a rating.
I've been reading Sharon Olds' Strike Sparks – selected poems from 1980-2002. If you've been reading Sylvia Plath (as I have), you should definitely read Sharon Olds next, if only to rest your brain and unkink it a bit after all that mental squinting. Another confessional poet, just as diamond hard, but far less allusive and with much much less of that fevered thick Amazon rainforest with so much bright and brilliant going on that in the end you just want a blindfold.
Everything you read about Olds talks about how she uses frank, direct, sometimes shocking language etc in dealing with the body and with sexuality. I dont know, I think those must have been pretty old people writing those reviews. Shes not so much shocking as just very capable and disinclined to take long cuts where a short one will do. She tells a very very good story, a lot of her work is like snapping micro-fiction. Killer images - …your/eyes filling with a terrible liquid like/balls of mercury from a broken thermometer/skidding on the floor. I love her linebreaks – I love the way she constantly breaks on the and and and but and all those really bad words to break on. And the way they really work.
She's good on family, really good on family, and does what poets are maybe meant to do, which is make you look again at your own experiences, look at them in carefulness, in a picky, dissatisfied, but good sort of way.
So go read some Olds.