Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds is one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices. Winner of several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Olds is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events. “Sharon Olds is enormously self-aware,” wrote David Leavitt in the Voice Literary Supplement. “Her poetry is remarkable for its candor, its eroticism, and its power to move.” Olds’s candor has led to both high praise and condemnation. Her work is often built out of intimate details concerning her children, her fraught relationship with her parents and, most controversially, her sex life. Critic Helen Vendler publically disparaged Olds’s work as self-indulgent, sensationalist and even pornographic. However, Olds has just as many supporters who praise her poetry for its sensitive portrayal of emotional states, as well as its bold depiction of “unpoetic” life events. Discussing Olds in Poetry, Lisel Mueller noted: “By far the greater number of her poems are believable and touching, and their intensity does not interfere with craftsmanship. Listening to Olds, we hear a proud, urgent, human voice.” And the poet Billy Collins has called her “a poet of sex and the psyche,” adding that “Sharon Olds is infamous for her subject matter alone…but her closer readers know her as a poet of constant linguistic surprise.” Source

Ode of Girls' Things

I loved the things that were ours—pink gloves,

hankies with a pastoral scene in one corner.

There was a lot we were not allowed to do,

but what we were allowed to do was ours,

dolls you carry by the leg, and dolls’

clothes you would put on or take off—

someone who was yours, who did not

have the rights of her own nakedness,

and who had a smooth body, with its

untouchable place, which you would never touch, even on her,

you had been cured of that.

And some of the dolls had hard-rubber hands, with

dimples, and though you were not supposed to, you could

bite off the ends of the fingers when you could not stand it.

And though you’d never be allowed to, say, drive a bus,

or do anything that had to be done right, there was a

teeny carton, in you, of eggs

so tiny they were invisible.

And there would be milk, in you, too—real

milk! And you could wear a skirt, you could

be a bellflower—up under its

cone the little shape like a closed

buckle, intricate groove and tongue,

where something like God’s power over you lived. And it

turned out

you shared some things with boys—

the alphabet was not just theirs—

and you could make forays over into their territory,

you could have what you could have because it was yours,

and a little of what was theirs, because

you took it. Much later, you’d have to give things

up, too, to make it fair—long

hair, skirts, even breasts, a pair

of raspberry colored pumps which a friend

wanted to put on, if they would fit his foot, and they did.

Published:

2015

Length:

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Childhood & Coming of Age

Womanhood