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The Wellspring
  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409001935
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 96
Categories:

The Wellspring



A bold and intimate collection from the winner of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize and one of America's most popular poets.

Over the last five years, Sharon Olds' poetry has become widely read and celebrated in Britain. Frank and exhilarating, sensual and profound, the poems stare, unblinking, at sex and death and love - showing these things to us in all their raw beauty.

This striking new collection is a sequence of poems that reaches into the very wellspring of life. The poems take us back to the womb, to childhood, to a searing sexual awakening, to the shock of birth, the wonder and humour of parenthood - and finally to the depths of adult love.

Always bold, musical and honest, The Wellspring plunges us into the essence of experience. This is a highly charged, sinuous, passionate book from one of the finest poets writing today.

  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409001935
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 96
Categories:

About the author

Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, educated at Stanford and Columbia universities, and has lived for many years in New York City. Her books have won many awards over the years. Her collection Stag’s Leap won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. In 2016 she won the Wallace Stevens award for her ‘outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry'.

Also by Sharon Olds

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Praise for The Wellspring

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

David Leavitt

Sentences roll on with breathless urgency, and the emotional pace of these unstoppered utterances is remarkably effective... Visceral in detail and unsparingly honest in its psychology, the volume offers a tenderness and integrity which allow even the more shockingly erotic or confessional moments to say something about innocence

Guardian

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 in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss

Michael Ondaatje

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