Balladz

(Paperback)

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Description

Arguably America's greatest living poet, Sharon Olds enters her eightieth year with a book for our times- a book of fear, fragility and love of life Arguably America's greatest living poet, Sharon Olds enters her eightieth year with a book for our times- a book of fear, fragility and love of life 'At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,' writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating collection, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, followed by her 'Amherst Balladz', honouring Emily Dickinson - 'she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me' - and leads to celebrations of lost friends and lovers- her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together. She examines her white privilege, sees her mother 'flushed and exalted at punishment time', celebrates the human body, even in ageing, and looks with wonder at the natural world and how we've spoiled it. Renowned for her poetry of searing honesty, sexual frankness and brave originality, Sharon Olds' new book emerges 'at the eleventh hour of the end of the world', from the time of plague, this time of loss, where she can look at the world and her life and tell us plainly 'love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing.'

Reviews

Sharon Olds, the winner of the 2012 TS Eliot Prize for Stag's Leap, is the first female American Poet to win the prize, and perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation. * Telegraph *
Sharon Olds recently turned 80... in Balladz, she proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping... remarkable. * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *
Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so you will follow wherever she leads... Olds's artistic signature - what really makes Sharon Olds Sharon Olds - is a kind of aggressive intimacy: a willingness to write. * New York Times *
Balladz showcases the range of Sharon Olds... the whole collection follows the fragility of life, the acceptance of aging, and the reckoning of America. * Electric Lit, *Favourite Poetry Collections of 2022* *
[A] brilliant and fearless poet. -- Joyce Carol Oates
Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I'll be reading her till I die. -- Fiona Benson
A tremendous book of grace and gallantry which crowns the career of a world-class poet. -- Carol Ann Duffy, praise for STAG'S LEAP
Sharon Olds goes where many poets would fear to tread and others not dream of treading. * Observer, praise for ARIAS *
Drawing on an unflinching interrogation of the self, these poems pulse with energy. * Guardian *

Author Bio

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag's Leap, she is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the winner of many other awards and honours. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of Isidor Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.