One Secret Thing Book

Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony.The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humor, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energyâ??sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and dangerâ??public and privateâ??illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Oldsâ??s characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on hisfirst rotation in the emergency room.On the ancient boarding-school radio,in the attic hall, the announcer had given myboyfriendâ??s name as one of twobrought to the hospital after the sunriseservice, the egg-hunt, the crashâ??one of themcritical, one of them dead. I was looking at thestairwell banisters, at their lathing,the necks and knobs like joints and bones,the varnish here thicker here thinnerâ??I had saidWhich one of them died, and now the world wasan antâ??s world: the huge crumb of eachsecond thrown, somehow, up ontomy back, and the young, tired voicesaid my fresh loveâ??s name.from â??Easter 1960â?Read More