Admit a Secret: On Sharon Olds

To read a Sharon Olds poem is to peer into some first instance of creation: to see that spark that must have been both the inevitable beginning and ending of all life. A few elements come together—crash together, really—forming one thing that is the root of all things. Call it love. Call it our humanity. Call it grace or light or clarity. Birth. Death. Desire. From her first book (Satan Says, 1980) through her recent fifteenth (Balladz, 2022), Olds writes poems that seem to conjure and reconstitute the sparks that animate our lives.

One remarkable feature of her poems is the way she manages to look incredibly closely at an object or emotion and then casts the scope of her attention so broadly as to sweep the whole world into her lines:

Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you,
I thought that you were only the background
for the leading characters—the plants
and animals and human animals.
It’s as if I had loved only the stars
and not the sky which gave them space
in which to shine. Subtle, various,
sensitive, you are the skin of our terrain,
you’re our democracy...
—From “Ode to Dirt”

In another poem, a cedar box becomes a gateway to radical honesty about the nature of rage and grief and love. In another, tiny strips of cardboard offer a path toward self-love and forgiveness. A spoon becomes a conduit for intersectional awareness in yet another poem. And elsewhere, the tampon, “unhonored one,” helps Olds rewrite rules regarding what and who we honor. The poet Hafiz once wrote, “Good poetry makes the universe admit a secret.” Over and over, this is what poetry by Sharon Olds does.

Olds frequently takes as her subject the daily, often banal aspects of life, and from these quotidian details she reimagines what splendor can look like and mean. A diaphragm. A penis that reminds her of a slug. Childbirth. A son’s seizures. The tools we use to punish and prod: “In my mother’s house, it was a whiskered hairbrush,/its tortoise stripes beautiful as a honeybee’s fur,” Olds writes in a poem from Arias (2019) called “Sprung Trap.” And the tools we employ for praise. In one poem from Balladz, she writes of choosing not to kill a spider: “With a juice glass/and a large postcard,/I trapped the glorious dancer.” Sweat and desire. Graying hair and hangovers. The inglorious aspects of our lives and our deaths are made, by her graceful, careful lines, worthy, wonder-full, and new.