Course:Stag's Leap (Sharon Olds book)
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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Stag’s Leap is a 2012 book of poems by Sharon Olds. It chronicles her separation from her husband and his infidelity in their marriage. It’s very much a narrative book of poetry, with each poem feeling almost like a short chapter in a novel.
Sharon Olds excels as an autobiographical poet because she can approach complex and terrible subjects with humor and grace without dampening their emotional devastation. Some of her earlier poems deal with her abusive family–I’d normally find that subject matter really hard to read about, but I keep returning to them. Stag’s Leap is no exception. What I found most wrenching about this book was not the intense detail in which she captures the turmoil of her divorce, but the moments of tenderness she still experiences toward her husband, which rise up suddenly and sharply: “I weep how I love to be like my guy,” she writes.
“Last Look” is my favorite poem in the collection, and one of my favorite poems of all time. It ends with a litany of reasons why Olds is glad things went the way they did. Sometimes, we’re encouraged to find the good in horrible things with the assumption that doing so will make the bad less intolerable. I really don’t think it works that way, and I think Sharon Olds doesn’t either. Finding the good makes the horrible things sting even worse, but it also makes you feel more alive, more whole. So it’s worth it.
Last Look
In the last minute of our marriage, I looked intohis eyes. All that day until then, I had been
comforting him, for the shock he was in
at his pain–the act of leaving me
took him back, to his own early
losses. But now it was time to go beyond
comfort, to part. And his eyes seemed to me,
still, like the first ocean, wherein
the blue-green algae came into their early
language, his sea-wide iris still
essential, for me, with the depths in which
our firstborn, and then our second, had turned,
on the sides of their tongues the taste buds for the moon-bland
nectar of our milk–our milk. In his gaze,
rooms of the dead; halls of loss; fog-
emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow:
he was in there somewhere, I looked for him,
and he gave me the gift, he let me in,
knowing he would never once, in this world or in
any other, have to do it again,
and I saw him, not as he really was, I was
still without the strength of anger, but I
saw him see me, even now
that dropping down into trust’s affection
in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet,
and I said, Good-bye, and he said, Good-bye,
and I closed my eyes, and rose up out of the
passenger seat in a spiral like someone
coming up out of a car gone off a
bridge into deep water. And two and
three Septembers later, and even
the September after that, that September in New York,
I was glad I had looked at him. And when I
told a friend how glad I’d been,
she said, Maybe it’s like with the families
of the dead, even the families of those
who died in the Towers–that need to see
the body, no longer inhabited
by what made them the one we loved–somehow
it helps to say good-bye to the actual,
and I saw, again, how blessed my life has been,
first, to have been able to love,
then, to have the parting now behind me,
and not to have lost him when the kids were young,
and the kids now not at all to have lost him,
and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have
lost someone who could have loved me for life.