Stags Leap, Sharon Olds
Stags Leap, Sharon Olds
List: $10.00 | Sale: $7.00
Club: $5.00

Stag's Leap
Poems

Author: Sharon Olds

Narrator: Sharon Olds

Unabridged: 1 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/17/2021


Synopsis

In this wise and intimate new book, Sharon Olds tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.

As she carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending, 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 bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip; the radical change in her sense of place in the world. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and who now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable “Stag’s Leap,” “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’s 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 she has yet given us.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Dave

Stag’s Leap Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine looks like my husband, casting himself off a cliff in his fervor to get free of me. His fur is rough and cozy, his face placid, tranced, ruminant, the bough of each furculum reaches back to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight......more

Goodreads review by Janet

An entire book of poems about a divorce after thirty years of marriage examines love and loss, age and youth, the body, what it is to be together and to be alone, and successfully capturing the most beautiful, subtle moments of realization. I've never seen the subject of marriage examined with such......more

I'm not a poet, and I admit that there were some poems here that were hard to understand. But I felt the Sharon Olds' pain and grief. And that's what matters to me: that the poet was able to channel her emotions to me, the reader. That she was able to relate to me the ruthless beauty of what she was......more


Awards

  • Pulitzer Prize