Stag's Leap
A highly personal collection that looks directly at divorce, grief, memory, and the possibility of renewed freedom.
Work Information
The experience of divorce is turned into language without softening the pain.
Stag's Leap is a candid collection about what remains after a separation, moving between memory and self-recovery.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Jonathan Cape
- Published
- 2012-10-04
- Pages
- 96 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.2 x 0.9 x 19.7 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780224096942
- ISBN-10
- 022409694X
- Price
- 2987 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize Stag's Leap , Sharon Olds' stunningly poignant new sequence of poems, tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. In this wise and intimate telling - which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending - Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband's smile to the set of his hip. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable title poem, 'When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver'. Olds' propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music - sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.
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.
Reviews
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Deeply , exquisitely nuansed ode to love
Rated at 5 for the rendering of emotion, never more than necessary,but deeper than any other expression. Love which is viewed as completing the incomplete rendering whole once parted. A true poet .
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beautifully written.
This is a breathtaking book about the end of Old's marriage, breathtaking because it makes you wonder how much is true and how the other parties feel about the publicity. A multiple prize winner, beautifully written.
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memory of a marriage
beautiful
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Her poignant poetry touches the soul
Sharon Olds sublimates the act of leaving with a mature understanding of the inevitable metamorphosis of emotions. She succeeds in universalizing the personal by persistently probing into the recesses of ambivalent sensations.
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Extraordinary
I am still dipping into this extraordinary account of the experience of the breakdown of a marriage in poetry. Her brilliant imagary, her poignant account are too much to bear in one sitting. I am glad that I read a review of this in the Guardian and bought it.
Related Literary Awards
- T. S. Eliot Prize Edition 20 (2012) ・Winner