In her poetry collection Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds maps out the terrain of her divorce, grief, mourning and acceptance. Married to her doctor husband for 32 years, he had an affair with a colleague, divorced Olds and then married the “other woman.” Her marriage ended fifteen years ago and the poems were written over the course of those years.
Olds is surprisingly kind to her husband in these poems, no words of hate or raw anger, mostly sorrow, confusion, shame (as though there was something she did wrong) and deep hurt as she tries to come to terms with his betrayal and the end of their life together.
She begins to suspect something when she finds a photo of a woman in the laundry. She asks him about it. He lies. And then:
In a novel, I said, this would be when
the wife should worry — is there even the slightest
reason to worry. He smiled at me,
and said, it seemed not by rote,
but as if it were a physical law
of the earth, I love you. And we made love,
and I felt so close to him — I had not
known he knew how to lie, and his telling me
touched my heart.
After he leaves and she is drinking a bottle of their favorite wine, one that has a leaping stag on the label, she thinks her ex-husband is like the stag:
casting himself off a
cliff in his fervor to get free of me.
There is much searching in the poems, lots of wondering why, but not much blame, hardly any blame. In fact, she seems to come to the conclusion that they both had an equal hand in the dissolution of their relationship:
He fell in love with her because I
didn’t suit him anymore —
nor him, me, though I could not see it, but he
saw it for me. Even, even,
our playing field — we inspired in each other
a generousness. And he did not give
his secrets to his patients, but I gave my secrets
to you, dear strangers, and his, too —
At the end os such a long relationship there are so many things that remind a person of the past and how things used to be and they always come upon one when least expected:
When my hand is groping on the toolroom shelf for ex-
marital liquor to drink by myself,
it bumps something it knows by one bump
and rustle, one chocolate bar with almonds, then the
muffled thunk of another — he would hide them,
then give me one when I was sad. When he left,
he did not think, as who would,
to go to the caches and empty them, to the
traps and spring them.
The poems are all well done. There are some beautiful lines and images. But as a whole, I found the book meh, which was disappointing especially since I like Olds and the book won the Pulitzer earlier this year. The poems felt conventional in spite of them being emotionally honest. I have never been divorced or devastated after a long term relationship so I was looking for a way to relate to the experience and situations in the poems. But there is something that kept me out. The poems didn’t move out past their singular intimacy to a broader perspective, didn’t invite me to feel involved in them. They didn’t make it out of my head. I didn’t once get a rush of excitement over a perfect line or butterflies in my stomach — what I call poetry stomach — that made me say wow, this is a really amazing poem. I am sure there are plenty of people who will find these poems deep and moving but they just didn’t work for me.
That is a shame that the poems failed to “move out past their singular intimacy”. I suppose they would seem to pale in comparison to Hardy’s 1912-13 poems. I hope the Pulitzer judges did not give the prize because they thought the book connected to a lot of people’s experience and might connect to a big public – that really ought not to be quite enough.
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Ian, I’ve not read Hardy’s poems…yet, but Olds’ poems had a certain bland evenness to them that sort of made them all run together for me. Olds is generally well thought of in the US. I wold hate think that the judges chose the book for the broad appeal of the subject matter or that they thought, well it’s about time we gave her the prize. I don’t know what other books were up for consideration so it’s hard to guess.
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I find it interesting that you were unable to make a connection with the poems. Could it be that somehow her kindness towards her husband was disappointing?
Maybe her acceptance of the end of the relationship just didn’t ring true. How could a woman not want to say at least once, “You bastard!”
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Lydia, I don’t think I was disappointed by how kind she was to her husband though I would have expected anger and a “you bastard!” at least once. After awhile the poems started to feel same-y, they were on such an even steady keel, no heights or depths. Other than sometimes having some interesting line breaks the poems felt too refined if that makes sense, as though they had been worked over so many times that anything raw or powerful had been smoothed over.
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I find the quotation starting with “He fell in love” very intriguing. It evokes many thoughts as the words sound to me as if a relationship based on equality has come to an end and now ‘even’ (as in opposed to uneven)is gone. ‘He saw it for me’ (I read that as very, very patronizing) being his token of generousness, and she to get ‘even’ again sharing her secrets and his, with strangers generously. Could it be read like this or is the english as a foreign language once again running away with me?
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Cath, oh yes, it can totally be read like that. I like your reading. I read generousness as ironic like you, but I also read “even” as getting back at each other, settling scores and this is not the first time she has shared their secrets and this is not the first time he was patronizing to her, but an ongoing thing, that they were always equals throughout. So I guess that comes out same as your reading but I want to extend it to their entire relationship through time.
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I thought the excerpts you chose were quite lovely. In fact, I got a lump in my throat. But then, we all bring our own experiences with us and are touched by different things. I do know what you mean by “that perfect line,” though. It’s so true.
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Grad, the writing is lovely and the poem in which she found the hidden chocolate is my favorite in the collection. But over all, they lacked a certain oomph for me. It may be because I have never been divorced or betrayed in such a way, but I expected really goods poems to make that lack of commonality irrelevant.
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No blame…that is surprising, though these sound interesting, yet not of a high enough caliber for the Pulitzer. Perhaps that prize raised your expectations. I do like some of the examples you posted here. I’ll have to check this collection out at some point.
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saqustocox, I know, isn’t it? I think the prize did raise my expectations. But I’ve read Olds before, even attended a reading once long ago and liked her work very much, found it had depth and punch. And while the poems here are all well written they just didn’t really leave the page for me.
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Sharon Olds on an even keel? That makes me want to read through this volume!
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Jeanne, I know! I suppose it could be the evenness is a reflection of her sorrow and grief but even so I expected at least a few more forceful poems. If you read it, I will be interested what you make of it!
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Interesting. I’ve read and liked another Olds book, The Father, so I wonder if I would like this one or would have a similar experience to yours. I have a feeling The Father is a more urgent, gripping kind of book than this one.
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Rebecca, I’ve read some of the poems from The Father and somehow they seems very different from these. Yes, they are more urgent than Stag’s Leap, and maybe I was wrong to expect this book to be similar. With a betrayal and divorce I expected there would be all sorts of roiling emotion. She talks about feeling it but talking about feeling it and imparting that feeling to the poem and the reader are two different things.
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I wonder if her poems were her trying to work her way thoughtfully through the dissolution of her marriage – that she was trying to be adult about it, and admit she had a hand in it failing, even if she can’t pinpoint how or why. I have been looking for it to pick up, and I think I still will, though I know now that it won’t be full of anger and disappointment and shock, which I think is what I want in a collection about the ending of something. Especially as I have been divorced (not that anyone has to be like me in their emotions though), and it was amicable, there was still plenty of hurt and anger and disappointment.
I know exactly what you mean by a line of poetry giving you butterflies in your stomach. I find images in poems can do that for me, too, and I go back and reread these poems over and over.
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Susan, yes, I suspect she was trying to work her way thoughtfully through it all and I expected there to be all those emotions spilling out all over but her thoughtfulness held them all in check. If you read it I will be interested in what you make of it. I am also glad I am not the only who gets butterflies over an especially beautiful line or poem. Those are definitely the ones I go back to over and over as well.
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I do like those excerpts-but I can sort of relate to what she went through–still not everything speaks to each reader the same. Too bad this didn’t quite work for you, but I still think it’s cool that you are such a good poetry-reader!
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Danielle, the writing isn’t bad, they are very good poems, but I just didn’t connect with them like I expected to. That happens sometimes.
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