Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds (review)

Sharon Olds’s most recent collection of poems, Stag’s Leap, winner of the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, tells the story of the breakup of the poet’s thirty-year marriage. Olds, a seasoned confessional poet whose first book, Satan Says, was published in 1980, is the first American woman to win the T. S. Eliot Prize. Olds’s strong, distinctive voice brings to this book, which has been described as “beyond the confessional,” an example of the poet’s full control over her art. These poems deal with some of the most painful subjects concerning her feelings about the end of her marriage, her ex-husband, and herself. Olds has often spoken of wanting to depict life so exactly and so honestly that the experience would be like “just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.” It is something she has clearly achieved in this collection.

In Stags Leap there is a wonderful variation in tone from the almost funereal “Bruise Ghazal,” which is not a true ghazal but carries the didactic, relentless quality of the form, to the playful “Left-Wife Goose,” with its use of the rhythms and syntax of a nursery rhyme. But the real surprise of this book is how, despite the quite difficult subject matter of the collection, so many of the poems end with a simple micro-turn, making even the saddest poems finish on an optimistic upbeat. Olds gives us a book in which poem after poem of devastating despair leaves us with a feeling of hope.

In “Poem for the Breasts,” the poet uses her own breasts as metaphors for longing for a lost love. The poet’s breasts are described as separate from herself, even separate from each other, each with its own qualities. The poet grieves with them, “I hold them a moment, / one in each hand, twin widows, / heavy with grief.” But both are as docile and simple as cows:

… they are waiting for him, myChrist they are dumb, they do not evenknow they are mortal—

By separating her breasts from herself, Olds is able to use them as a most personal metaphor for grief and loss. In “Tiny Siren,” the poet finds a picture of a woman at the bottom of the washer “like a girl / brought up in a net of fish.” She soon recognizes the woman in the picture as a colleague of her husband. The gesture of drawing this very small, almost lost image, this hint of a husband’s duplicity out of the depths of the washer, is brilliant.

For a book about the breakup of a marriage, there is a good deal of sex going on. Couple that with Olds’s characteristic scathing honesty and we may start to have a sense of why this collection has garnered so much attention. In “Material Ode,” the poet tells the story of a husband going off to an annual event, one the poet and he have enjoyed together in the past. The speaker’s husband tells his long-time wife that she can’t go to the ball because it will be awkward for his lover to see the wife dancing with him. He takes off in his tux, leaving her behind, with a smile on his face. And when he comes home, the poet admits, she has sex with him. There is something raw, honest, visceral, and painful about this moment—Olds manages to avoid, at least in this instance, a kind of victimhood. That the speaker (and by this I mean Olds) reveals a peculiar complicity in her own crushing moment is at once unsettling and strangely liberating.

Throughout the book, Olds returns to metaphors of silence and birds. It is through these two images that she demonstrates what she considers to be the reason for the downfall of the marriage. In several poems reference is made to her husband’s...