Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds (b. 19 November 1942, San Francisco) is an American poet whose work has redefined what is sayable in American poetry. She writes about the body — giving birth, making love, watching a parent die, nursing a child, the sweat and blood and milk and semen of physical existence — with a frankness and specificity that was shocking when she began publishing in the 1980s and remains arresting. Her poetry is confessional in the tradition of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, but more physical, more sexual, and more directly engaged with the body as a site of both ecstasy and suffering.

Life and Career

Olds was born in San Francisco and raised in Berkeley in a strict Calvinist household — an upbringing she has described as emotionally and sometimes physically abusive, and that she has explored extensively in her poetry. She studied at Stanford University and received her PhD from Columbia University. She has taught at New York University for decades, where she also founded the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital (now the Coler Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center) on Roosevelt Island, teaching poetry to people with severe physical disabilities.

Her debut collection, Satan Says (1980), was immediately noticed for its candour about family violence, sexual desire, and the body. The Dead and the Living (1984) — which won the National Book Critics Circle Award — established her as a major poet. It is divided into two sections: poems about public violence (war, political murder, historical atrocity) and poems about private life (childhood, marriage, parenthood, sex), and the juxtaposition argues that the personal and the political are experienced through the same body.

The Father (1992)

The Father is the most devastating collection of poems about death in contemporary American poetry. It follows Olds’s father through his death from cancer — from the hospital ward to the deathbed to the funeral — with an intimacy that many readers find unbearable. The poems describe the father’s deteriorating body (the skin, the bones, the breath, the fluids) with the same specificity that Olds brings to sex and birth in other collections. The dying body is not aestheticised or metaphorised: it is presented in its full physical reality.

What makes the collection extraordinary is the complexity of the speaker’s emotional response. This is not a sentimental elegy: the father was abusive, and the speaker’s feelings encompass grief, rage, tenderness, revulsion, and a terrible, complicated love. The poems are acts of witness — she watches him die, she describes what she sees, and she refuses to simplify the experience.

Stag’s Leap (2012)

Stag’s Leap — about the end of Olds’s thirty-year marriage — won both the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize, the only poetry collection ever to receive both awards. The poems are devastatingly honest about the experience of being left: the shock, the humiliation, the self-examination, the slow reconstruction of a self that has been defined by a relationship.

The title refers to the Napa Valley winery where Olds and her husband spent time — and to the image of a stag leaping, which becomes a metaphor for her husband’s departure. The collection is remarkable for its refusal of bitterness: Olds writes about the end of her marriage with the same unflinching attention she brings to everything, and the emotional range — from devastation to dark humor to unexpected gratitude — is extraordinary.

Odes (2016)

Odes is Olds’s most joyful and playful collection — a series of odes to the body’s parts and functions (the hymen, the clitoris, the tampon, the penis, the stretch marks, the love handles) that celebrate physical existence with a Whitmanesque exuberance. The poems are funny, tender, and politically pointed — they insist that female bodies, ageing bodies, imperfect bodies deserve the same lyric attention that poetry has historically reserved for youth and beauty.

Themes and Critical Standing

Olds’s central subject is the body — the body in pleasure, the body in pain, the body giving birth, the body dying, the body in the act of love, the body bearing the marks of violence and time. Her insistence on physical specificity — on naming what happens to bodies in precise, concrete language — is her signature and her most important contribution to American poetry.

She has been criticised by some critics for a perceived narrowness of subject (the personal, the domestic, the bodily) and for a confessional mode that can feel exhibitionistic. But her defenders — and they are legion — argue that the body is not a narrow subject but the only subject, and that Olds’s refusal to look away from physical reality is an ethical as much as an aesthetic commitment.

She has been compared to Walt Whitman (for the celebration of the body), to Sylvia Plath (for the confessional intensity), and to Anne Sexton (for the treatment of female sexuality). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Key Works

• The Dead and the Living (1984) — National Book Critics Circle Award
• The Father (1992)
• Stag’s Leap (2012) — Pulitzer Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize
• Odes (2016)

Collecting Olds

Satan Says (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980) first edition brings $50–$150 — scarce in fine condition. The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984) first edition brings $30–$80. Stag’s Leap (Knopf, 2012) first edition brings $20–$50; signed copies $40–$80. Olds signs at poetry festivals and NYU events. Her substantial bibliography — over a dozen collections — is accessible and collectible.