The Dead and the Living

by Sharon Olds

Overview

From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a beautifully realized collection of poems about childhood, love, marriage, children, and honoring the dead. 

Larry Lewis say, “The Dead and the Living is an unignorable book, something truly rare. The feeling behind it is painful, but exquisitely so. Pain made into art or what, in another time, people called ‘beauty.’” It is an achievement of a poet writing in the full measure of her powers.

The Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307760548
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/05/2012
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	1,002,705
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

SHARON OLDS was born in 1942, in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her first book of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and in the N.Y.U. workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. More recently she was awarded the Walt Whitman Citation for Merit by the New York State Writers Institute of the State University of New York. The citation officially invested her with the title of New York State Poet for 1998-2000.

Table of Contents

Part 1	Poems for the Dead
I	Public
	Ideographs	5
	Photograph of the Girl	6
	Race Riot, Tulsa, 1921	7
	Portrait of a Child	8
	Nevsky Prospekt	9
	The Death of Marilyn Monroe	10
	The Issues	11
	Aesthetics of the Shah	12
	Things That Are Worse Than Death	13
II	Private
	The Guild	17
	Grandmother Love Poem	18
	The Eye	19
	Birthday Poem for My Grandmother	20
	Of All the Dead That Have Come to Me, This Once	21
	Farewell Poem	22
	The Winter After Your Death	24
	Miscarriage	25
	The End	26
	Best Friends	27
	Absent One	28
Part 2	Poems for the Living
I	The Family
	Possessed	33
	The Victims	34
	The Forms	35
	The Departure	36
	Burn Center	37
	The Ideal Father	38
	Fate	40
	My Father Snoring	41
	The Moment	42
	My Father's Breasts	43
	The Takers	44
	The Pact	45
	The Derelict	46
	Late Speech with My Brother	47
	The Elder Sister	48
II	The Men
	The Connoisseuse of Slugs	51
	Poem to My First Lover	52
	New Mother	53
	The Line	54
	The Fear of Oneself	55
	Poem to My Husband from My Father's Daughter	56
	Sex Without Love	57
	Ecstasy	58
III	The Children
	Exclusive	61
	Six-Year-Old Boy	62
	Eggs	63
	Size and Sheer Will	64
	For My Daughter	65
	Rite of Passage	66
	Relinquishment	67
	Son	68
	Pre-Adolescent in Spring	69
	Blue Son	70
	Pajamas	71
	The Killer	72
	The Sign of Saturn	73
	Armor	74
	35/10	75
	The Missing Boy	76
	Bread	77
	Bestiary	78
	The One Girl at the Boys' Party	79
	The Couple	80