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A review by thewhimsicalowl
Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds
5.0
"When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver" (Stag's Leap, 15).
July 2023: Everyone knows Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap, Louise Glück's Vita Nova, and Anne Carson's "Glass Essay" are the holy heartache trinity for literary gals. I don't make the rules.
"And you couldn't say, / could you, that the touch you had from me / was other than the touch of one / who could love for life" (Poem of Thanks, 82).
How differently this collection strikes my head and heart roughly a year later. I remember feeling pulled to a used copy while in Bath at the beginning of the year, not knowing all that would unfold. Around that same time, Jane Hirshfield's "The Visible Heat" began haunting my brain.
Olds' words are saturated with the rawness of grief, the eerie release after giving up the fight: "It is what I do now: not go, not / see or touch... / I am a stunned knower / of not" (Not Going to Him, 25).
She aptly captures the dilemma of the writer/beloved: "I who had no other / gift to give the world but to hold what I / thought was love's mirror up to us" (Not Quiet Enough, 48-49).
August 2022: Real poetry girlies get emotional about Sharon Olds at sunset on a park bench (prepared all the while to fend off seagulls from their gluten-free fish and chips).
4.5 stars. Stag's Leap is a blunt force trauma to the heart, a testimony there's no correct timeline for grief. I think it's interesting that I've been gravitating lately to poetry collections that so greatly diverge from my own life experiences; I haven't personally known divorce, miscarriage, or the death of parents, yet these words still penetrate my very marrow and rattle around in my brain.
Olds excavates love as fickle and yet, even so, the most beautiful thing we can have and hold.
"I thought / wherever we were, we were in lasting love - / even in our separateness and / loneliness, in love - even the / iceberg just outside the mouth, its / pallid, tilting, jade-white / was love's, as we were. We had said so" (Love, 31).
Even in the ache, hope and healing creep in like ivy: "I saw, again, how blessed my life has been, / first, to have been able to love, / then, to have the parting now behind me... " (Last Look, 14).
#sealeychallenge2022
July 2023: Everyone knows Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap, Louise Glück's Vita Nova, and Anne Carson's "Glass Essay" are the holy heartache trinity for literary gals. I don't make the rules.
"And you couldn't say, / could you, that the touch you had from me / was other than the touch of one / who could love for life" (Poem of Thanks, 82).
How differently this collection strikes my head and heart roughly a year later. I remember feeling pulled to a used copy while in Bath at the beginning of the year, not knowing all that would unfold. Around that same time, Jane Hirshfield's "The Visible Heat" began haunting my brain.
Olds' words are saturated with the rawness of grief, the eerie release after giving up the fight: "It is what I do now: not go, not / see or touch... / I am a stunned knower / of not" (Not Going to Him, 25).
She aptly captures the dilemma of the writer/beloved: "I who had no other / gift to give the world but to hold what I / thought was love's mirror up to us" (Not Quiet Enough, 48-49).
August 2022: Real poetry girlies get emotional about Sharon Olds at sunset on a park bench (prepared all the while to fend off seagulls from their gluten-free fish and chips).
4.5 stars. Stag's Leap is a blunt force trauma to the heart, a testimony there's no correct timeline for grief. I think it's interesting that I've been gravitating lately to poetry collections that so greatly diverge from my own life experiences; I haven't personally known divorce, miscarriage, or the death of parents, yet these words still penetrate my very marrow and rattle around in my brain.
Olds excavates love as fickle and yet, even so, the most beautiful thing we can have and hold.
"I thought / wherever we were, we were in lasting love - / even in our separateness and / loneliness, in love - even the / iceberg just outside the mouth, its / pallid, tilting, jade-white / was love's, as we were. We had said so" (Love, 31).
Even in the ache, hope and healing creep in like ivy: "I saw, again, how blessed my life has been, / first, to have been able to love, / then, to have the parting now behind me... " (Last Look, 14).
#sealeychallenge2022