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Selected Poems
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  • Published: 30 September 2014
  • ISBN: 9781473521513
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160

Selected Poems

Formats & editions
EBook
30 Sept 2014
Audiobook
27 Sept 2022
Tr. Paperback
15 Oct 2005
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The new Selected Poems from the bestselling winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds's poetry 'pure fire in the hands' and cheered the 'roughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss'. This rich selection - made by the author - 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 revisited - the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfilment of marriage, the wonder of children - but each re-casting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits.

A powerful distillation of the best work from one of America's most gifted and widely read poets, drawn from her seven published volumes, this is a testament to a remarkable writer's depth, range and continuing development.
  • Published: 30 September 2014
  • ISBN: 9781473521513
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
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About the author

Sharon Olds

SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement, as well as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the UK’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap. She is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the recipient of many other awards and honors, including the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says (1980), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of the former S. S. Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.
portrait photo of Sharon Olds

Also by Sharon Olds

Balladz
Arias
Penguin Modern Poets 3
Odes
Stag's Leap
One Secret Thing
The Unswept Room
See all

Praise for Selected Poems

Sharon Olds' poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the toughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion of her work

Michael Ondaatje

The attention to line, the superbly focused detail, the way her autobiographical detail strikes, shines, deepens, spreads: this, surely is the sound the confessional hordes have been trying to utter since Lowell, the right road that is missed so easily

Glyn Maxwell

Sharon Olds explores her own experience with an intransigent honesty and fiery dignity. The reader might flinch at the intimacy, but Olds strikes straight out for the truth

Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times

If any reading is 'essential', this is it

Carol Rumens

Olds remains too little-known in the UK...readers new to her will be astounded

Kate Clanchy, Independent

Her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive. She sees description as a means to catharsis, and the end result is impossible to forget... Her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism, and its power to move

David Leavitt