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Stag's Leap
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  • Published: 4 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448130320
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 96

Stag's Leap

Formats & editions
EBook
4 Oct 2012
Audiobook
17 Aug 2021
Tr. Paperback
15 Oct 2012
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In this emotional new collection from 'America's greatest living poet', Sharon Olds lays bare her divorce and the bones of lost love - her most powerful collection yet and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and T.S. Eliot Prize.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize

Stag's Leap, Sharon Olds' stunningly poignant new sequence of poems, tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. In this wise and intimate telling - which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending - Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband's smile to the set of his hip.

Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable title poem, 'When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver'.

Olds' propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music - sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.
  • Published: 4 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448130320
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 96
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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
One Secret Thing
Selected Poems
The Unswept Room
See all

Praise for Stag's Leap

Each image of Sharon Olds' searing Stag's Leap brands itself on retina and heart - how will I ever forget the "Tiny Siren" found by accident in the washing machine?

Gerda Stevenson, Morning Star

Sharon Olds, the winner of the 2012 TS Eliot Prize for Stag’s Leap, is the first female American Poet to win the prize, and perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation.

Tom Payn, Telegraph

Olds, who has always had a gift for describing intimacy, has, in a sense, had these poems thrown at her by life and allowed them to take root: they are stunning – the best of a formidable career.

Kate Kellaway, Observer

[A] brilliant and fearless poet.

Joyce Carol Oates

A tremendous book of grace and gallantry which crowns the career of a world-class poet.

Carol Ann Duffy, Huffington Post

Taut and beautiful poems.

Edna O'Brien, Guardian

Brave, generous and very moving.

Mark Sanderson, Sunday Telegraph

[It] amazed me...great, heartfelt, monumental book.

Toby Litt, New Statesman

The most powerful piece of writing I've encountered in decades... The raw emotion of break up transcends every known cliché thanks to her generosity of spirit and the awe-inspiring choreography of her language.

Laura George, Image Magazine

I read this poetry collection with my heart in my mouth.

Jamie Quatro, Guardian

I treasure this collection of poems: so beautiful, so personal, so revolutionary. Every time I return to this book I find a line, a stanza that I understand better, differently, appreciate just a little more.

Cherie Jones, Guardian
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