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4.01 AVERAGE
4.01 AVERAGE
Painful and dangerous. I got to the end and felt stripped down, scored to the bone. But also ashamed, like I'd read her private diary and judged a man I have never even met. It's a jagged book, tough to swallow... and I don't know that I will pull any one piece from it without remembering the whole. So much pain.
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
This collection weighs on the heart, whether or not one has experienced such a loss of love. While several of the poems provoke the reader with intruiging images and metaphors, others read like raw journal pages and seem to lack in some way Olds' usual sharpness. I imagine it was difficult to put such emotion into words, which is why the editing filter of a poetic voice is lost in several of the poems, but this book is certainly worth a read, as the better of the poems are brilliant.
I needed this. Some poems in this book spoke to parts of me that I did not know needed healing. Why didn't I discover Sharon Olds earlier?
Whoa, that's a lot of musings on divorce. Either this kind of poetry is your cup of tea or it's not... this self-revelatory inward looking self-examination works or it doesn't.
I’ve loved Sharon Olds since I read her in high school and was struck by the brutal, sometimes grotesque, rawness of her words. She tells it like it is and then also makes it beautiful. So of course she’s one who helps walk me through my own heartbreak and divorce and makes sense of it, makes it a narrative that can make sense, because it has to.
fast-paced
My habit is to write these little jottings only after I have finished a book, but in the case of "Stag's Leap", I am not at all sure that I will ever 'finish'.....I will re-read this again and again, for each poem has such perfectly chosen language, such heart-breaking imagery, such passion. I was deeply affected by this poetic 'autopsy' of a marriage in a way that was not quite the same as having read Joan Didion's "A Year of Magical Thinking", another intense volume about loss. I do not know whether it is the form of poetry that lends itself better to the topic, or whether Didion, as a journalist, could only report her experiences. This comparison is only my own--Didion's work kept popping into my head between reading's of Olds's work--but I recall feeling that 'Magical Thinking' had a rigorously intentional crisp, dispassionate, clinical approach to grief and that Olds has the poet's freedom of unlimited expressiveness. Whatever, dear reader, I cried. And I loved it.