In Which Nick Reads "Blood, Tin, Straw", By Sharon Olds

It's unusual for me to read a book of poetry cover to cover.  I tend to skim, read a few pages, pick it up again a few days later, read a few more.  Eventually it goes back to the library, half finished.

And, in all honesty, I kind of did that with Blood, Tin, Staw, a collection of poems by the celebrated Sharon Olds.  But I did actually make the effort to read most of this book, and I did read it more or less all at the same time.  It's the first time I have really done that with a poetry book.  It was a fascinating experience, one that I would compare to sort of wondering through an art expedition with unlimited time to take everything in.

The great poet Sharon Olds

It's fitting that it should be Ms. Olds, as she is one of the first poets I read during my single creative writing class in college and it was a relevation, not in terms of form or of thought but of boldness.  This is the woman, after all, who wrote a poem about the Pope's penis.  Her poems can be erotic, at times unsettlingly celebratory of utter decadence; but they are also bold, and raw, and I thought that if she could write with that freedom about such subjects, well, what does it matter if I drop an F-bomb here or there?  It gave me the freedom to start writing with my own voice, or at least what I thought was my own voice.

All that said, with this book I found myself skipping a few poems here and there.  That is because a great many of Sharon Olds' poems are about sex, or about childbirth, and at times it can be a bit much.  There are times when I feel that maybe Olds' (at least in her current incarnation) is at her best when she focuses on other things. There are poems about her family, poems about the end of life (or at least preparing for it), and one poem about the Challenger explosion written probably several years on, which is excellent.

But what I value now about Olds is the way that her words feel.  This is a poet who writes more with the heart than with the head, her poems are visceral.  She describes in one poem, called "The Remedy" opening a honey jar (what she is going to actually do with the honey I will leave to the interested reader), and she describes how grainy the honey gumming up the jar lid is, and how hard it is to finally get it moving, and you can feel that, you've experienced it, and it adds a sort of depth to her poems because they are so real, it puts you in the midst of whatever it is she is trying to convey.  It makes her poems very accessible, and that gives a sort of power.

And that is pretty cool.

Thank you, Sharon Olds.  You are pretty great.  And I like your hair.