The Wellspring

by Olds, Sharon

• ISBN13: 9780679765608
• ISBN10: 0679765603
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1996-01-30
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

Sharon Olds's dazzling new collection is a sequence of poems that reaches into the very wellspring of life. The poems take us back to the womb, and from there on to childhood, to a searing sexual awakening, to the shock of childbirth, to the wonder and humor of parenthood--and, finally, to the depths of adult love. Always bold, musical, honest, these poems plunge us into the essence of experience. This is a highly charged, beautifully organized collection from one of the finest poets writing today.

Author Biography

Sharon Olds was born in 1942, in San Francisco, and was educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her poetry has won both the Lamont Poetry Selection and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and in the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York.

Table of Contents

Part 1
Visiting My Mother's College	3	(1)
My Parents' Wedding Night, 1937	4	(1)
The Planned Child	5	(1)
Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942	6	(1)
Earliest Momory	7	(1)
My First Weeks	8	(2)
For My Mother	10	(1)
The Lisp	11	(1)
Christian Child	12	(3)
Killing My Sister's Fish	15	(1)
The Swimming Race	16	(1)
Parents' Day	17	(1)
Dirty Memories	18	(2)
Mrs. Krikorian	20	(5)
Part 2
Necking	25	(2)
First	27	(2)
Adolescence	29	(1)
Early Images of Heaven	30	(1)
Celibacy at Twenty	31	(2)
The Source	33	(2)
Making Love	35	(1)
I Love It When	36	(1)
The Dragons	37	(1)
After Making Love in Winter	38	(1)
May 1968	39	(4)
Part 3
First Birth	43	(1)
Her First Week	44	(1)
Bathing the New Born	45	(1)
History of Medicine	46	(2)
Milk-Bubble Ruins	48	(1)
Socks	49	(1)
A Mother at the End of June	50	(1)
Twelve Years Old	51	(1)
The Hand	52	(2)
Good Will	54	(1)
Lament	55	(1)
Poem to Our Son After a High Fever	56	(2)
Prayer During That Time	58	(1)
Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil	59	(1)
The Cast	60	(1)
The Siblings	61	(1)
Love's Eyesight	62	(1)
The Transformed Boy	63	(1)
The Last Birthday at Home	64	(1)
Solo	65	(1)
Physics	66	(1)
My Son the Man	67	(1)
First Formal	68	(1)
The Ordeal	69	(1)
The Lady Bug	70	(2)
The Bonding	72	(1)
High School Senior	73	(1)
The Pediatrician Retires	74	(5)
Part 4
This Hour	79	(2)
His Father's Cadaver	81	(2)
West	83	(1)
Lifelong	84	(1)
Full Summer	85	(1)
Last Night	86	(1)
Am and Am Not	87	(1)
True Love	88

Excerpts

Bathing the New Born

I love with an almost fearful love
to remember the first baths I gave him--
our second child, our first son--
I laid the little torso along
my left forearm, nape of the neck
in the crook of my elbow, hips nearly as
small as a least tern's hips
against my wrist, thigh held loosely
in the loop of thumb and forefinger,
the sign that means exactly right. I'd soap him,
the long, violet, cold feet,
the scrotum wrinkled as a waved whelk shell
so new it was flexible yet, the chest,
the hands, the clavicles, the throat, the gummy
furze of the scalp. When I got him too soapy he'd
slide in my grip like an armful of buttered
noodles, but I'd hold him not too tight,
I felt that I was good for him,
I'd tell him about his wonderful body
and the wonderful soap, and he'd look up at me,
one week old, his eyes still wide
and apprehensive. I love that time
when you croon and croon to them, you can see
the calm slowly entering them, you can
sense it in your clasping hand,
the little spine relaxing against
the muscle of your forearm, you feel the fear
leaving their bodies, he lay in the blue
oval plastic baby tub and
looked at me in wonder and began to
move his silky limbs at will in the water.

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Excerpted from The Wellspring: Poems 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.