The Father Poems

by OLDS, SHARON

• ISBN13: 9780679740025
• ISBN10: 0679740023
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1992-04-21
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

The Father is a sequence of poems, a daughter's vision of a father's illness and death. It chronicles these events in a connected narrative, from the onset of the illness to reflections in the years after the death. The book is, most of all, a series of acts of understanding. The poems are impelled by a passion to know and a freedom to follow wherever the truth may seem to lead. The book goes into areas of feeling and experience rarely entered in poetry. The ebullient language, the startling, far-reaching images, the sense of extraordinary connectedness seize us immediately. Sharon Olds transforms a harsh reality with truthfulness, with beauty, with humor--and without bitterness. The deep pain in The Father arises from a death, and from understanding a life. But there is joy as well. In the end, we discover we have been reading not a grim accounting but an inspiriting tragedy, transcending the personal. The radiance and daring that have always distinguished Sharon Olds' work find here their most powerful expression.

Author Biography

Sharon Olds was born in 1942, in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her first book of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and in the N.Y.U. workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. More recently she was awarded the Walt Whitman Citation for Merit by the New York State Writers Institute of the State University of New York. The citation officially invested her with the title of New York State Poet for 1998-2000.

Table of Contents

The Waiting	p. 3
Nullipara	p. 5
The Pulling	p. 6
The Glass	p. 7
Death and Morality	p. 9
The Picture I Want	p. 10
The Lumens	p. 11
His Terror	p. 12
His Stillness	p. 13
The Want	p. 14
The Lifting	p. 15
The Look	p. 17
The Struggle	p. 18
The Present Moment	p. 20
Last Acts	p. 21
The Transformed One	p. 22
Last Words	p. 23
Close to Death	p. 24
Wonder	p. 25
The Race	p. 26
The Request	p. 28
Psalm	p. 29
My Father's Eyes	p. 31
The Last Day	p. 32
The Exact Moment of His Death	p. 35
His Smell	p. 37
The Dead Body	p. 39
Death	p. 41
The Feelings	p. 42
After Death	p. 44
What Shocked Me When My Father Died	p. 46
Death and Murder	p. 47
The Mortal One	p. 48
The Urn	p. 49
His Ashes	p. 50
Beyond Harm	p. 52
The Underlife	p. 53
One Year	p. 54
The Swimmer	p. 56
The Exam	p. 57
Natural History	p. 59
The Cigars	p. 60
Parent Visiting Day	p. 62
Letter to My Father from 40,000 Feet	p. 63
The Pull	p. 65
The Ferryer	p. 67
The Motel	p. 69
I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died	p. 71
When the Dead Ask My Father about Me	p. 73
To My Father	p. 75
Waste Sonata	p. 76
My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead	p. 78
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