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The Unswept Room
  • Published: 15 March 2003
  • ISBN: 9780224069786
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $32.99

The Unswept Room

Formats & editions
EBook
1 July 2010
Paperback
15 Mar 2003
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'Sharon Old's poems are pure fire in the hands... I love the toughness and humour and brag and tenderness and comletion in her work' - Michael Ondaatje

The Unswept Room is a dazzling collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and rhythm, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humour. From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical and emotional sensations seldom confronted in poetry.

These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imaginations with unexpected word play, sprung rhythms and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.
  • Published: 15 March 2003
  • ISBN: 9780224069786
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Sharon Olds

SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement, as well as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the UK’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap. She is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the recipient of many other awards and honors, including the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says (1980), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of the former S. S. Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.
portrait photo of Sharon Olds

Also by Sharon Olds

Balladz
Arias
Penguin Modern Poets 3
Odes
Stag's Leap
One Secret Thing
Selected Poems
See all

Praise for The Unswept Room

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

David Leavitt

The attention to line, the superbly focused detail, the way her autobiographical material strikes, shines, deepens, spreads: this, surely, is the sound the confessional hordes have been trying to utter since Lowell, the right road that is missed so easily

Glyn Maxwell, Times Literary Supplement

Olds remains too little-known in the UK... readers new to her will be astounded

Kate Clanchy, Independent

If any reading is 'essential', this is it

Carol Rumens