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From the Bookshelf: Sharon Olds -- One Secret Thing

Ever since I read Sharon Olds’ The Dead and the Living in the hot throes of a single evening, I’ve been an ardent admirer of her work. I’ve long been haunted by many of her poems: the acerbic socio-political scathing of ‘Republican Living Rooms”; the diabolical maternal angst of “Airport Hotel” from Satan Says; the clever loss of illusion in “The Death of Marilyn Monroe”; the sinister family dynamic in any of the ‘father’ poems like “The Eye,” or “Burn Center.” Her work reads like a beautiful nightmare. The poem "The Music" from the series Cassiopeia sums it up in a few breathtaking lines: 'Now I hear the melody/of the one bound to the mast.'

What I admire about Olds, and what is present though this new collection One Secret Thing is her sheer audacity, her total willingness to say what is unspoken or what we’re privately thinking. The work is raw, tender, horrific, and confrontational. She is unflinching.

So much of the experience catalogues in One Secret Thing (and other works) is an open wound. The work truly 

seems to bleed from the page. Failed relationships with old lovers, tremendously painful relationships with a dying mother and an alcoholic, cruel father.

The subject matter is often brutal. This doesn’t change with the new work (2008). The method and the style are not too different either. But here is what I find amazing about her work. She takes these raw wounds, the blood and guts of her life, and she transforms them. She uses the poem itself as means of absorbing, understanding, and expanding on these moments of her life – not necessarily into something beautiful, which would be trite, but into something poetic, which is fascinating.

About a quarter of the poems in this collection are about Olds’ dying mother, referred to as "a scrimshaw Crusader." It’s heartbreaking to read them. They are replete with sorrows of the end of the human experience. It’s not pretty. It’s infuriating, nauseating, hard-to-read. I’m not sure if a poem is a way out of that sorrow and misery, but it’s definitely a way to make it through it, somehow with your humanity in one piece, however battered and old. That is what Olds does. To borrow a line from the poem "When Our Firstborn Slept In": 'I walked a like hunter in the horror-joy/of the unattached.' Yes, so do we.

I don’t figure Olds is unafraid. She is not. She is deeply horrified by life, by the degenerative nature of it. She writes poems about looking at her bottom in the mirror, and the lines make you cringe; not from the physical description, but from the grappling of the narrator, as she tries to find a meaning or a beauty in the pockmarks, the sagging, the dying -- "now exhausted, as if tragic.' ("Self-Portrait, Rear View." And you know, she almost pulls it off, and that sense of her trying, of grappling, is deeply moving. She writes, comically, 'I wonder/if anyone has ever died,/looking in a mirror, or horror...."

Like The Dead and the Living, this collection is a mix of personal poems and more socially, collectively conscious poems. There are war poems about sacrifice, and there are vitriolic poems clearly aimed the White House and conservatives. That mix works, to a point, and I get the connection that is trying to be made. The personal poems are much more successful, much more tender and moving. Olds lets us into the rooms where the night lights are on and the mother has forgotten to close her night robe, and that voyeuristic sense is crucial to appreciating or running from her work. She is the 'scout of the mortal, heart breaking into solo.' ("The Music."

Much of the work is a nightmare. Yes, but a beautiful one. I can relate. For every poem about the messiness of death, you’ll find an equally powerful one about the start of life (like “Umbillicus”). It’s the cleverness of the poet that makes us associate the two, that bring them into union. From the poem "Something is Happening": There is something big coming/bigger than love, bigger than aloneness./She's staying up all night for it.....You know, I think I am, too. Bring it on.