shanviolinlove 's review for:

Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds

3.0

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I took my time reading Olds' collection Stag's Leap, for here she is recalling the events surrounding and following the end of her marriage - more specifically, the end of love. Olds is positioned in a vulnerable seat of the left-behind spouse, forced to terminate a love that she is not ready to relinquish. I was surprised that her comments about her ex were not singed with bitterness or anger; rather she takes a more sympathetic attitude towards him - "I am half on the side of the leaver," taken from the title poem - missing him, revisiting tender feelings toward him, grieving almost the way a widow would in memory of her husband. At times this vexed me as a reader; her emotions would seem one-dimensional in the glaring absence of anger, of acknowledgement that her husband is the object of her pain (in some poems she communicates the very opposite). I almost wondered if she was, in fact, too timid to openly acknowledge the husband's betrayal. As she states in "Known to Be Left," "I am so ashamed/before my friends-to be known to be left," and yet she heaps all the shame of the divorce upon herself. Her husband she remembers with fond sadness, again, positioning herself almost as a widow pining for a husband suddenly made perfect by his very separation and absence.

However, I appreciate how Olds creates poetry in everyday moments and objects - a haircut, a mouse in a mousetrap, the face of an illness, a newspaper. She invites the poetry to comment on her life situations - a vase of tulips when her husband tells her he's leaving her, a bruise on her hip when she considers the wound her divorce has made upon her, etc. While I do not find all her poems to be "believable," I do find them to be beautiful, and though I agree with some of the harsher critiques of this book, I am ultimately glad that I read this work.