The Dead and the Living
by Sharon Olds
Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 0-394-71563-2, 80 pages, 1983, $15.00
Winner of the 1984 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Poetry, Sharon Olds returns in her second collection of poetry with a voice that hypnotizes the reader and then leads them throughout her life. It is a voice that I fell in love with when I read her first book Satan Says for its raw energy and understanding of the good and evil of human nature.
In The Dead and the Living, Olds gives us a God’s-eye view of death with her poem "Ideographs," and then she leads us forward into childhood, abuse, growing up, love, adultery, and the joys of motherhood. Her poetry is rich with imagery, simile, and her metaphors are powerful and stunning, sometimes shocking, but always tastefully penned. Like Sexton and Plath before her, Olds is a true Confessionalist poet.
The Guild
Every night, as my grandfather sat
in the darkened room in front of the fire,
the liquor like fire in his hand, his eye
glittering meaninglessly in the light
from the flames, his glass eye baleful and stony,
a young man sat with him
in silence and darkness, a college boy with
white skin, unlined, a narrow
beautiful face, a broad domed
forehead, and eyes amber as the resin from
trees too young to be cut yet.
This was his son, who sat, an apprentice,
night after night, his glass of coals
next to the old man’s glass of coals,
and he drank when the old man drank, and he learned
the craft of oblivion— that young man
not yet cruel, his hair dark as the
soil that feeds the tree’s roots
that son that would come to be in his turn
better at this than the teacher, the apprentice
who would pass his master in cruelty and oblivion,
drinking steadily by the flames in the blackness,
that young man my father.
Works like "The Guild" make Olds a true master at her craft, and The Dead and the Living is a modern classic that delivers 80 pages of gripping poetry. It is the sort of book that you cannot put down until you turn the last page, and then you want to go back and start over from the beginning.
by Shawn Nacona Stroud