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One Secret Thing (2008)

by Sharon Olds(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0375711775 (ISBN13: 9780375711770)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Knopf

review 1: For me, the most powerful poems in this collection are the ones about letting go--of a young adult daughter, of a dying mother, of lifelong battles. Sharon Olds has been writing about her dysfunctional family of origin throughout her career, but these poems mark a dramatic shift that occurred during her mother's final illness, when forgiveness and compassion offered "my last chance / to free myself."
review 2: Last night, Sharon Olds read from her new collection, One Secret Thing, at The Literary Center at the Margaret Mitchell House. It was a packed house, and I waited in line for an hour to get my copy signed. I also had the rare pleasure to observe a private reception where Olds talked to a dozen high school students about poetry. It was during this session ... morethat Olds read "I Go Back to May 1937," which, for me, is the equivalent of hearing Anne Sexton read "Her Kind." The students didn't get the gravity of the moment, but I was in awe to hear her read this classic poem. The public reading last night was exclusively poems from One Secret Thing until she asked that the camera filming the event be turned off so she could read the first draft of a new poem about race relations she had written that morning in her hotel room. Another rare pleasure. As she began her reading, Olds said the new collection is "against war," but since this is Sharon Olds, war comes in many guises, including finding a sought-after peace with her dying mother. Indeed, the first section of the book is simply called "War" and Olds used photographs from World War II to arrive at these short, powerful pieces. However, in an ingenious twist, she stripped out any reference to the era so that the poems stand as a treatise against any kind of war. In the second section, "The Cannery," shifts to a familiar battleground -- her family life. Her mother takes center stage in this section and the abuse Olds' suffered at her hands in what she has described as a "Calvinist hellfire" home. She also had the balls to use an unflattering review from bitter William Logan as an epigraph to the poem "Calvinist Parents": Sometime during the Truman Administration, Sharon Olds's parents tied her to a chair, and she is still writing about it. Olds goes on to unleash 20 lines that are better than anything Logan has written, or will write, in his life. There are a number of side-trips away from the main theme, which are quirky and full of humor in the midst of the war. One is "Self-Portrait, Rear View," which she performed on HBO's Def Poetry Jam and that you can watch at this link, and a lovely poem dedicated to Edmund White called "Sleeves," where she realizes that one of her childhood crushes was most likely gay. Then the collection closes with the death of Olds' mother and these are heartbreaking poems. Olds said she fought the urge to title the collection The Mother, saying it would have been too neat a bookend to The Father. The poems are broken into two sections -- "Cassiopeia" (which is the cover image of the collection) and "One Secret Thing" -- and chronicle the discovery of her mother's brain tumor, the vigil at her deathbed and the scattering of her ashes at sea. While these poems are deeply personal, there is a universality about them that will cut close to home for anyone who has lost a parent. One Secret Thing effectively brings to a close a story Olds has been telling us in her last eight collections. There is a sense of release and hard-won peace by this brilliant collection's end. I drew a heavy sigh as I read the last poem, "Nereid Elegy," about Olds and her family putting her mother's ashes into the water along with flowers plucked from her garden. There is finally closure for Olds and this collection allows us to share it with her. What a gift. less

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