The Unswept Room

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Overview

From Sharon Olds—a stunning new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor.

From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical, emotional, and spiritual sensations that are seldom the stuff of poetry.

These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the ...

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More About This Book

Overview

From Sharon Olds—a stunning new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor.

From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical, emotional, and spiritual sensations that are seldom the stuff of poetry.

These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.

Editorial Reviews

You don't have to attend one of Olds' readings to appreciate these poems, but it is astonishing to compare how well the distinctive poetic voice echoes the author's own. Book after book, in perfectly tuned four-stress laments, Olds captivates readers with impressions of daily life. Often self-deprecating and humorous, she records the so-called "best hours of our lives," including infancy and first kisses. For Olds, looking back is never gratuitous, and while there is much darkness in the author's own childhood, many of her poems demonstrate the ways an attentive adult life can rectify a troubled youth. Poets often negotiate their past in verse, but no one serves up the humor and grace of common domesticity like Olds. Author—Stephen Whited
Stephen Whited
You don't have to attend one of Olds' readings to appreciate these poems, but it is astonishing to compare how well the distinctive poetic voice echoes the author's own. Book after book, in perfectly tuned four-stress laments, Olds captivates readers with impressions of daily life. Often self-deprecating and humorous, she records the so-called "best hours of our lives," including infancy and first kisses. For Olds, looking back is never gratuitous, and while there is much darkness in the author's own childhood, many of her poems demonstrate the ways an attentive adult life can rectify a troubled youth. Poets often negotiate their past in verse, but no one serves up the humor and grace of common domesticity like Olds.
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
Publishers Weekly
From her debut Satan Says (1980) through Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), Olds has tackled child sexual abuse and grownup women's sexuality on a post-Freudian (some said post-feminist) canvas of love, hate, revenge. This seventh volume of verse offers Olds's regulars all they have come to expect: "blood skin and tongue," "glass, bone metal, flesh, and the family." Olds describes "the day my folks/ sashed me to a chair"; the day her speaker "slowly cut off [her] eyelashes"; her desire "to work off/ my father's and my sins"; a father's cross-dressing; the Virgin Mary's vulva ("the beauty of her lily"); birth-control practices and pro-choice politics; menopause (at 491/2); and memories of parturition: "there came that faint, almost sexual wail, and her/ whole body flushed rose." All these moments appear, as usual, in confidently effective free verse that leaves no reader behind. Olds's followers may be delighted, or simply surprised, as they find, midway through the volume, an increasing focus on happiness: poems such as "The Hour After" and "If, Someday" portray the great sex and the commitment the speaker shares with her male partner: "I love/ to not know/ what is my beloved/ and what is I." Another group of moving poems consider her pleasures as an empty-nest parent, sharing space or conversation with "nearly-grown children." Olds has never been thought technically innovative, and this collection will not convert detractors. It will, however, offer her many fans new work to chew on, presented with her usual intense honesty, along with "some fancies of crumbs/ from under love's table." (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
As always, Olds boldly re-creates her life in verse, but here she offers more than surface narrative, cleaning out that unswept room to discover "a time of passion so/ extreme it was almost calm." A finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. (LJ 9/15/02) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780375709982
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 9/17/2002
  • Edition description: 1ST
  • Pages: 144
  • Sales rank: 695,973
  • Product dimensions: 5.85 (w) x 8.35 (h) x 0.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her previous books are Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, The Gold Cell, The Wellspring, The Father, and Blood, Tin, Straw. She was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and was one of the founders of the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. Her work has received the Harriet Monroe Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

The Unswept Room

By Sharon Olds

Knopf

Copyright © 2002 Sharon Olds
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0375414894

Bible Study: 71 b.c.e.

After Marcus Licinius Crassus]BRK defeated the army of Spartacus,]BRK he crucified 6,000 men.]BRK That is what the records say,]BRK as if he drove in the 18,000]BRK nails himself. I wonder how]BRK he felt, that day, if he went outside]BRK among them, if he walked that human]BRK woods. I think he stayed in his tent]BRK and drank, and maybe copulated,]BRK hearing the singing being done for him,]BRK the woodwind-tuning he was doing at one]BRK remove, to the six-thousandth power.]BRK And maybe he looked out, sometimes,]BRK to see the rows of instruments,]BRK his orchard, the earth bristling with it]BRK as if a patch in his brain had itched]BRK and this was his way of scratching it]BRK directly. Maybe it gave him pleasure,]BRK and a sense of balance, as if he had suffered,]BRK and now had found redress for it,]BRK and voice for it. I speak as a monster,]BRK someone who this hour has thought at length]BRK about Crassus, his ecstasy of feeling]BRK nothing while so much is being]BRK felt, his hot lightness of spirit]BRK in being free to walk around]BRK while others are nailed above the earth.]BRK It may have been the happiest day]BRK of his life. If he had suddenly cut]BRK his hand on a wineglass, I doubt he would]BRK have woken up to what he was doing.]BRK It is frightening to think of him suddenly]BRK seeingwhat he was, to think of him running]BRK outside, to try to take them down,]BRK one man to save 6,000.]BRK If he could have lowered one,]BRK and seen the eyes when the level of pain]BRK dropped like a sudden soaring into pleasure,]BRK wouldn't that have opened in him]BRK the wild terror of understanding]BRK the other? But then he would have had]BRK 5,999]BRK to go. Probably it almost never]BRK happens, that a Marcus Crassus]BRK wakes. I think he dozed, and was roused]BRK to his living dream, lifted the flap]BRK and slowly looked out, at the rustling, creaking]BRK living field-his, like an external]BRK organ, a heart.]BRK

Sunday Night

When the family would go to a restaurant,]BRK my father would put his hand up a waitress's]BRK skirt if he could-hand, wrist,]BRK forearm. Suddenly, you couldn't see]BRK his elbow, just the upper arm.]BRK His teeth were wet, the whites of his eyes]BRK wet, a man with a stump of an arm,]BRK as if he had reached behind the night.]BRK It was always the right arm, he wasn't]BRK fooling. Places we had been before,]BRK no one would serve us, unless there was a young]BRK unwarned woman, and I never warned her.]BRK Wooop! he would go, as if we were having]BRK fun together. Sometimes, now,]BRK I remember it as if he had had his]BRK arm in up to his shoulder, his arm]BRK to its pit in the mother, he laughed with teary]BRK eyes, as if he was weeping with relief.]BRK His other arm would be lying on the table-]BRK he liked to keep it motionless, to]BRK improve the joke, ventriloquist]BRK with his arm up the dummy, his own shriek]BRK coming out of her mouth. I wish I had stuck]BRK a fork in that arm, driven the tines]BRK deep, heard the squeak of muscle,]BRK felt the skid on bone. I may have]BRK met, since then, someone related]BRK to one of the women at the True Blue]BRK or at the Hick'ry Pit. Sometimes]BRK I imagine my way back into the skirts]BRK of the women my father hurt, those bells of]BRK twilight, those sacred tented woods.]BRK I want to sweep, tidy, stack-]BRK whatever I can do, clean the stable]BRK of my father's mind. Maybe undirty]BRK my own, come to see the whole body]BRK as blameless and lovely. I want to work off]BRK my father's and my sins, stand]BRK beneath the night sky with the full moon]BRK glowing, knowing I am under the dome]BRK of a woman who forgives me.]BRK


Excerpted from The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds Copyright © 2002 by Sharon Olds
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Table of Contents

Unknown 3
First Hour 7
Kindergarten Abecedarian 8
Bible Study: 71 B.C.E. 9
A Chair by the Fire 11
5 cents a Peek 13
Sunday Night 14
Grey Girl 19
Still Life in Landscape 23
His Costume 24
The Given 25
Virginal Orgy 27
The Wedding Vow 30
The Foetus in the Voting Booth 35
The Borders 39
First Weeks 40
The Releasing 42
The Clasp 43
Diaphragm Aria 44
The Hour After 45
What It Meant 49
Sunday in the Empty Nest 53
Directly 54
Frosted Elfin 55
The Stranger 56
Grown Children 57
If, Someday 58
The Window 61
Forty Years Later 65
Sleep Suite 67
The Older 68
Fish Oil 70
Earth Aria 71
Wonder as Wander 72
49 1/2 74
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant 79
Her List 83
Herbal Wrap 85
Pansy Glossary 87
The Headline 88
The Shyness 89
April, New Hampshire 91
The Untangling 93
The Learner 97
Mother 101
Heaven to Be 103
7 a.m 104
Chamber Thicket 106
The Music 107
A Time of Passion 109
The Tending 113
Acadia, Late 117
S 118
Past Future Imperfect 119
Wilderness 120
Psalm 121
The Unswept 123

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 10, 2006

    THE UNSWEPT ROOM by Sharon Olds

    This is not poetry! It is the rantings of a woman obsessed with herself and her anguish. I don't care. Her verse is sexuallly explicit and offensive, in particular the poem titled 'Sunday Night' in which she recounts the improper, what could even be considered criminal behavior of her father towards the waitresses at the restaurants her family would frequent. What is worse, when this poem was written and published, her father was deceased, and unable to answer to these statements. I wonder if these behaviors actually took place, and, if not, why would the poet sully the name of her dead father? Also, what impact did this poem have on her mother? Perhaps Ms. Olds can write a poem to address these issues. I cannot recommend this dreadful 'poetry' to anyone. Sincerely, Catherine Ross

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted September 24, 2002

    'Unswept' swept me away

    Melodic truth, sweet, simple, "garden-variety epiphanies", delicate, translucent memories...Honest. I love it.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
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