Strike Sparks

by OLDS, SHARON

• ISBN13: 9780375710766
• ISBN10: 0375710760
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2004-09-28
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

A powerful collection from one of our most gifted and widely read poets117 of her finest poems drawn from her seven published volumes. Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds's poetry "pure fire in the hands" and cheered the "roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss." This rich selection exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisitedthe pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfillment of marriage, the wonder of childrenbut each recasting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits. Strike Sparksis a testament to this remarkable poet's continuing and amazing growth. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and was educated at Stanford and Columbia. She was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and was one of the founders of the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Her work has received the Harriet Monroe Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. She lives in New York City.<br><br>Sharon Olds’s <i>The Dead and the Living; The Gold Cell; The Wellspring; The Father; Blood, Tin, Straw; </i>and <i>The Unswept Room </i>are available in Knopf paperback<i>.</i><br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>

Table of Contents

from Satan Says (1980)
Indictment of Senior Officers	3	(1)
The Sisters of Sexual Treasure	4	(1)
Station	5	(1)
Monarchs	6	(1)
Infinite Bliss	7	(1)
The Language of the Brag	8	(2)
The Talk	10	(1)
I Could Not Tell	11	(4)
from The Dead and the Living (1984)
Ideographs	15	(1)
Photograph of the Girl	16	(1)
Race Riot, Tulsa, 1921	17	(1)
Of All the Dead That Have Come to Me, This Once	18	(1)
Miscarriage	19	(1)
My Father Snoring	20	(1)
The Moment	21	(1)
The Connoisseuse of Slugs	22	(1)
New Mother	23	(1)
Sex Without Love	24	(1)
Ecstasy	25	(1)
Exclusive	26	(1)
Rite of Passage	27	(1)
35/10	28	(1)
The Missing Boy	29	(1)
Bestiary	30	(1)
The One Girl at the Boys' Party	31	(4)
from The Gold Cell (1987)
Summer Solstice, New York City	35	(2)
On the Subway	37	(2)
The Food-Thief	39	(1)
The Girl	40	(2)
The Pope's Penis	42	(1)
When	43	(1)
I Go Back to May 1937	44	(1)
Alcatraz	45	(1)
Why My Mother Made Me	46	(1)
After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood	47	(1)
Cambridge Elegy	48	(2)
Topography	50	(1)
I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror	51	(1)
The Moment the Two Worlds Meet	52	(1)
Little Things	53	(1)
The Month of June: 13½	54	(1)
Looking at Them Asleep	55	(4)
from The Father (1992)
The Glass	59	(2)
His Stillness	61	(1)
The Lifting	62	(1)
The Race	63	(2)
Wonder	65	(1)
The Feelings	66	(2)
His Ashes	68	(2)
Beyond Harm	70	(1)
The Underlife	71	(1)
Natural History	72	(1)
The Ferryer	73	(2)
I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died	75	(2)
Waste Sonata	77	(2)
My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead	79	(4)
from The Wellspring (1996)
My Parents' Wedding Night, 1937	83	(1)
Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942	84	(1)
Killing My Sister's Fish	85	(1)
Mrs. Krikorian	86	(2)
First	88	(2)
Adolescence	90	(1)
May 1968	91	(2)
Bathing the New Born	93	(1)
41, Alone, No Gerbil	94	(1)
Physics	95	(1)
My Son the Man	96	(1)
First Formal	97	(1)
High School Senior	98	(1)
The Pediatrician Retires	99	(2)
This Hour	101	(2)
Full Summer	103	(1)
Am and Am Not	104	(1)
True Love	105	(4)
from Blood, Tin, Straw (1999)
The Promise	109	(2)
Know-Nothing	111	(2)
Dear Heart,	113	(1)
19	114	(2)
That Day	116	(2)
After Punishment Was Done with Me	118	(2)
What Is the Earth?	120	(1)
Leaving the Island	121	(2)
The Prepositions	123	(2)
1954	125	(2)
Cool Breeze	127	(2)
For and Against Knowledge	129	(2)
The Spouses Waking Up in the Hotel Mirror	131	(2)
You Kindly	133	(3)
Where Will Love Go?	136	(2)
The Protestor	138	(1)
The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb	139	(1)
The Talkers	140	(2)
First Thanksgiving	142	(1)
The Native	143	(2)
The Knowing	145	(4)
from The Unswept Room (2002)
Kindergarten Abecedarian	149	(1)
Bible Study: 71 B.C.E.	150	(2)
5¢ a Peek	152	(1)
Grey Girl	153	(2)
Still Life in Landscape	155	(1)
The Wedding Vow	156	(2)
His Costume	158	(1)
First Weeks	159	(2)
The Clasp	161	(1)
Diaphragm Aria	162	(1)
The Window	163	(2)
Fish Oil	165	(1)
Wonder as Wander	166	(2)
The Shyness	168	(2)
April, New Hampshire	170	(2)
The Untangling	172	(2)
The Learner	174	(2)
Heaven to Be	176	(1)
The Tending	177	(2)
Psalm	179	(2)
The Unswept	181

Excerpts

Topography

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
intricately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep inside your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

First Thanksgiving

When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a
soul in a body. She came into my life the
second great arrival, fresh
from the other world — which lay, from within him,
within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,
week after week, the moon rising,
and setting, and waxing — whirling, over the months,
in a steady blur, around our planet.
Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has
had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult
to have her in that room again,
behind that door! As a child, I caught
bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,
looked into their wild faces,
listened to them sing,
then tossed them back
into the air — I remember the moment the
arc of my toss swerved, and they entered
the corrected curve of their departure.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Excerpted from Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002 by Sharon Olds
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.