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  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407053448
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 96

One Secret Thing




A stunning collection of poems focusing on the emotions involved in family life from the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness 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 humour, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy - sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger - public and private - illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revision, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds's characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.

  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407053448
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 96

About the author

Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, educated at Stanford and Columbia universities, and has lived for many years in New York City. Her books have won many awards over the years. Her collection Stag’s Leap won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. In 2016 she won the Wallace Stevens award for her ‘outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry'.

Also by Sharon Olds

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Praise for One Secret Thing

A memorable collection

M Wynn Thomas, The Guardian

As devastatingly accurate in its depiction of our deepest wishes and secret inner lives as we have come to expect from this brilliant and fearless poet

Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year

Her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive. She sees description as a means to catharsis, and the result is impossible to forget... Sharon Olds is enormously self-aware; her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism, and its power to move

David Leavitt

Sharon Olds's poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the roughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss

Michael Ondaatje

She has written without embarassment or apology, with remarkable passion and savagery and nerve, poems about family and family pathology, early erotic fascination and sexual life inside marriage

Amy Hempel