- Paperback: 88 pages
- Publisher: Secker & Warburg (Feb 25 1993)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0436339528
- ISBN-13: 978-0436339523
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 118 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Library Journal
These startling poems work and rework the poet's experience of her father dying from cancer. Many take place at his deathbed, detailing the physical horror of the disease as if to exorcise it: "When they empty out his catheter bag,/ pouring the pale, amber fluid/ into the hospital measuring cup, it is/neither good nor bad, it is only/ the body." But at its heart, this book is about the poet's coming to terms with a father she has hated: an alcoholic, divorced from her mother, and at times cruel and remote. Olds handles this very difficult terrain directly, without sentimentality: "I would have traded/ places with anyone raised on love,/but how would anyone raised on love/bear this death?" At its best, her work calls to mind James Wright's stunning leaps from the physical into prayer: "Yes the tears came/ out like juice and sugar from the fruit--/ the skin thins and breaks and rips, there are/ laws on this earth and we live by them." Psalm-like, these poems make beauty from pain without softening it. For most collections.
- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Sharon Olds's poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss. The elegy is one of the root-forms of poetry, but the fifty-two poems in Sharon Olds' The Father, radiating from a death, feel new. The death of the father - anticipated, witnessed, remembered - draws from Olds an extraordinary dry attentiveness... It is a wonderful book. Independent on Sunday
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Father,
By Mark Archer (Ridgecrest, Calif.) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Father (Paperback)
This is one of the most eloquent readings I have ever come across. Ms. Olds powerful use of metaphor to describe the tormented relationship she had with her father is insightful and inspiring. This should be required reading for any young female (indeed people of all genders and ages) struggling to find a means for remaining not only sane, inspite of the insanity in to which some of us are born, but how to remain caring, compassionate and creatively involved with your surroundings, despite the chaos of whatever personal hell you must survive to do so.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Genius,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Father (Paperback)
This is one of the best books I have ever read and Olds is a major talent, not just in the world of autobiographical poetry... but in the world of international literature. ---
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Authentic encounter with the experience of my father's death,
By
This review is from: The Father (Paperback)
My father died a month ago, after four years of illness. I was with him when he died, and I went to Amazon to look for a book that would help me to interact with the extraordinary experience of the death of my father. Sharon Olds' book was far more than I had hoped to have been able to find. I have been carrying it with me for two weeks now and reading passages over and over. She has written the poems I would have written had I been a poet in the middle of the experience of my father's dying. Exceptional and moving.
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