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.
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While he told me, I looked from small thing
to small thing, in our room, the face
of the bedside clock, the sepia postcard
of a woman bending down to a lily.
– WHILE HE TOLD ME
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(Vintage Digital, 4 October 2012, e-book, 100 pages, borrowed from National Poetry Library, #POPSUGARReadingChallenge, a book with the word leap in the title)
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I’m a fan of the poet and enjoyed Stag’s Leap a lot. The poems are very personal and intimate, mostly focused on the breakdown of her marriage and the aftermath. There is a lot of pain, regret, anger and sorrow between the pages of this book. I enjoyed every poem. I enjoyed this collection a lot. Some of the poems haunted me.
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