Blood, Tin, Straw: Poems: Amazon.de: Sharon Olds: Englische Bücher

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In such previous collections as The Gold Cell and The Dead and the Living, Sharon Olds tends to draw her impetus from the sexual landscape. The same might be said of the poems in Blood, Tin, Straw. Here, however, the libido is less invariably at center stage. Instead, Olds embraces her favorite subject--the body--in many different guises: as an object of love, desire, reproduction, and decay.

At its best, Blood, Tin, Straw captures effervescent moments with delectable poignancy. In "The Necklace," for example, the narrator recalls a falling strand of pearls that "spoke in oyster Braille on my chest." (She likens the pearls to the snake in the Garden of Eden, yet this beaded serpent seems more intimately related to her own family romance.) And in "My Father's Diary"--itself a strange precursor to the poems in The Father--Olds identifies the chronicle of a life with its departed creator:

My father dead, who had left me
these small structures of his young brain--
he wanted me to know him, he wanted
someone to know him.

Still, Olds has a tendency to trip over her own misspent innuendo. One poem in particular, "Coming of Age, 1966," collapses under the weight of a fabricated personal nostalgia, as the poet conflates her own writer's block with Nick Ut's famous photograph of a napalmed Vietnamese girl: "Every time / I tried to write of the body's gifts, / the child with her clothes burned off by napalm / ran into the poem screaming." Olds pins the blame for this atrocity (and for her writer's block!) on Lyndon Johnson. Yet the photo dates from 1972, which lets LBJ off the hook and points the finger at Richard Nixon. It may seem ludicrous to condemn a poem for being factually incorrect. However, the entire argument here is predicated upon Johnson's culpability in delaying the narrator's "entrance into the erotic." Offensive and overwrought, "Coming of Age, 1966" exemplifies Olds's worst poetic impulses. She does, it should be said, retain much of her appeal in Blood, Tin, Straw. Yet there's still a sense that she's substituting a tried-and-true trademark for her customary, earnest ease. --Ryan Kuykendall -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

From Booklist

If the body is the temple of the soul, then Olds is the priestess, and her poems are psalms in praise of sex, holy matrimony, and motherhood. Olds has always been a daring poet of the flesh, but now in her fifth book, a major work, she embraces the entire universe from its microscopic swirlings--tail-lashing sperm, the dividing of cells in a fertilized egg--to such cosmic spectacles as a blazing star or the volcanic shudders of the earth. Everything is eroticized. She sees galaxies in a sprinkling of sand on skin, the curve of a planet in the arc of an eye, and the whole of creation in the act of coitus. Lovers become so intimate, they inhabit each other's bodies, and Olds writes more forthrightly about women's sexuality--the hunger, blood, tensility, and heat of it--than any of her sister poets. This collection is poetry as memoir, mined from the very core of her being, and washed clean in the salt of the sea and of sweat, made sweet with mother's milk and honey, and blessed by the light that shines on each page from the entranced and grateful eyes of her readers. Donna Seaman -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

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Life, at its best, is poetry 29. Juli 2000

Von Lauren

Format:Taschenbuch

Sharon is a relative of mine, but before I knew that I knew her poetry. Again and again she has inspired me with the power she puts into her poetry--this collection is purely that, a collection, and claims to be nothing more, which is perhaps the most powerful aspect of her work. I look at my work and hers, and no one could deny that we think on the same wavelength...but yet....there is something unexplainable in her poems that I can never grasp, and that she rules.

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She Gives Her Soul 25. April 2000

Von Menchu Chang

Format:Gebundene Ausgabe

to every poem and thus, the reader. Old's newest book of poems has given me the light to transcend the hoi poloi of ordinary verse. Long live a true vates!

Sharon Olds, the double, double dare of poets 10. April 2000

Von Diana Saenz

This book of poetry is unique both in style and content. I am reminded of a statement made by Sharon Olds in a reading of hers that I attended where she was talked about her surprise when another poet revealed to her that the events in one of his poems never occurred. When he turned it around and asked if everything she wrote about came from personal experience, she response was, "Well, of course, always." However, it isn't simply the fact that she writes from her life's experience, because that can be said of many of the poets writing today. It is the honesty and the revelation wrought from her experiences that make her work like a four dimensional object, where one is not expecting the angle that one gets as the object turns.

There is also another kind of surprise that occurs in almost every poem. It is an undercurrent of violence, violence intimated, violence implied, violence thought, and violence that has occurred. And yet, the violence in Olds' work does not quite meet our expectations, which have been shaped and pounded by a deluge of film, news and docudrama. Olds doesn't seem to want to shock us, because she makes us believe that there is only one sensible conclusion. She accomplishes this by the depth and originality of each argument. There is such a purity of revelation behind each statement that the reader finds himself spellbound by the rationale, and privileged to find himself a new member of her sublime revolution.