Selected Poems

Her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive. She sees description as a means to catharsis, and the end result is impossible to forget… Her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism, and its power to move – David LeavittOlds remains too little-known in the UK…readers new to her will be astounded – Kate Clanchy * Independent *If any reading is ‘essential’, this is it – Carol RumensSharon Olds explores her own experience with an intransigent honesty and fiery dignity. The reader might flinch at the intimacy, but Olds strikes straight out for the truth – Rachel Campbell-Johnston * The Times *The attention to line, the superbly focused detail, the way her autobiographical detail strikes, shines, deepens, spreads: this, surely is the sound the confessional hordes have been trying to utter since Lowell, the right road that is missed so easily – Glyn MaxwellSharon Olds’ poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the toughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion of her work – Michael Ondaatje

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.

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