| Sharon
Olds is the author of eight volumes of poetry. Her poetry, says
Michael Ondaatje, is “pure fire in the hands,” and
David Leavitt in the Voice Literary Supplement describes
her work as “remarkable for its candor, its eroticism,
and its power to move.” With sensuality, humor, sprung
rhythm, and remarkable imagery, she expresses truths about domestic
and political violence, sexuality, family relationships, love,
and the body. Often compared to “confessional” poets,
she has been much praised for the courage, emotional power,
and extraordinary physicality of her work. A reviewer for The
New York Times hailed her poetry for its vision: “Like
Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger
than political oppression.”
Born in San Francisco, Sharon Olds
studied at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her
numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant;
a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; the San Francisco Poetry
Center Award for her first collection, Satan
Says (1980); and the Lamont Poetry Selection and the National
Book Critics Circle Award for The
Dead and the Living (1983). Her other books of poetry are
Strike
Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 (2004), Blood,
Tin, Straw (1999), The
Gold Cell (1997), The
Wellspring (1995), and The
Father (1992). Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker,
The Paris Review, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly,
and The New York Times. Named New York State Poet Laureate
(1998 – 2000), Olds teaches graduate poetry workshops
at New York University (now in it’s 21st year) and the
writing workshop she helped found at a 900-bed state hospital
for the severely disabled. She is a Chancellor of the Academy
of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Science. Olds’s next collection, One Secret Thing,
is nearing completion.
•••
“What
is most striking is Olds's vigorous and fecund metaphorical
imagination.”
— Joyce Peseroff,
The American Book Review
“I
cannot praise [Sharon Olds’ poetry] enough. It seems to
me not only faultless, but it also deals effortlessly with many
urgent subjects that are left out of so much contemporary poetry.
Every poem is a wonder – strong, actual, unsentimental
and without bullshit – in a world glowing with solid reality.”
— Peter Redgrove |
