A review by margedalloway
Stag's Leap: Poems by Sharon Olds

3.0

I who had no other
gift to give the world but to hold what I
thought was love's mirror up to us –
ah now, no puff of mist on it.
After that life is the singing dream,
I wake, and feared he felt he was the human
sleeper, and I the glittering panther
holding him down, and screaming.

None of the poems in this collection feel unnecessary, Olds manages to find a new perspective or insight in each one. I was most impressed by her depiction of language and storytelling's ability to simultaneously obfuscate and elucidate; she repeatedly implies that it is her constant speaking that is at the heart of her incompatibility with her husband whilst positing her poetry as a product of her family life. Olds resists the temptation to oversimplify without, for the most part, falling victim of excessive abstraction, a difficult task with such a personal subject.