One Secret Thing,New

A Powerful Collection Of Poems About Family And Griefby The Pulitzer Prize And T. S. Eliot Prize For Poetry Winner, Called 'A Poet For These Times, A Powerful Woman Who Wont Back Down' (San Francisco Chronicle).Sharon Olds Completes Her Cycle Of Family Poems In A Book At Once Intense And Harmonic, Playful With Language, And Rich With A New Selfawareness And Sense Of Irony.The Opening Poem, With Its Sequence Of Fearsome Images Of War, Serves As A Prelude To Poems Of Home In Which Humor, Anger, And Compassion Sing Together With Lyric Energysometimes Comic, Sometimes Filled With A Kind Of Unblinking Forgiveness. These Songs Of Joy And Dangerpublic And Privateilluminate One Another. As The Book Unfolds, The Portrait Of The Mother Goes Through A Moving Revisioning, Leading Us To A Final Series Of Elegies Of Hardwon Mourning. One Secret Thing Is Charged Throughout With Sharon Oldss Characteristic Passion, Imagination, And Poetic Power.The Doctor On The Phone Was Young, Maybe On Hisfirst Rotation In The Emergency Room.On The Ancient Boardingschool Radio,In The Attic Hall, The Announcer Had Given Myboyfriends Name As One Of Twobrought To The Hospital After The Sunriseservice, The Egghunt, The Crashone Of Themcritical, One Of Them Dead. I Was Looking At Thestairwell Banisters, At Their Lathing,The Necks And Knobs Like Joints And Bones,The Varnish Here Thicker Here Thinneri Had Saidwhich One Of Them Died, And Now The World Wasan Ants World: The Huge Crumb Of Eachsecond Thrown, Somehow, Up Ontomy Back, And The Young, Tired Voicesaid My Fresh Loves Name.From Easter 1960