10 of the Best Sharon Olds Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The American poet Sharon Olds (born 1942) was born and raised in California and educated at Stanford, although she has spent much of her adult life in New York City. Although she began writing under the shadow of other poets such as Gary Snyder and George Oppen, she resolved to write her way out from under the influence of earlier masters.

The result was her debut poetry collection, Satan Says, in 1980; other award-winning collections, such as The Dead and the Living (1984), followed. The Sign of Saturn, a 1991 selection of her early work, offers a good way in to her wonderful work and world. Michael Ondaatje, the author of The English Patient, perhaps put it best when he described Olds’ poetry as ‘pure fire in the hands’.

As she puts it in one poem, her work is about ‘paying attention to small beauties’, although her work doesn’t shy away from confronting the ghosts from her own childhood and the darker aspects of history.

Freeing herself from (male) poetic influence also entailed freeing herself from social restrictions about what women could do and be: there is a glorious rebelliousness in her work.

Although choosing the ten ‘best’ poems of such a prolific and significant poet is always going to prove difficult, depending as it does on individual preferences and interpretations, below we have endeavoured to select and introduce ten of Sharon Olds’ best – and best-known – poems that are widely considered to be some of her most powerful and acclaimed.

1. ‘Satan Says’.

This witty and subversive poem – the title poem from Olds’ debut 1980 collection –

challenges traditional religious views on femininity and sexuality, offering a feminist perspective on Eve and the Garden of Eden as the young girl is encouraged by Satan – in the form of a snake – to curse her parents and, indeed, curse more generally. (Warning: contains strong language!)

2. ‘I Go Back to May 1937’.

One of Olds’ best-known poems, this one demonstrates why she has sometimes been compared to Sylvia Plath (although the comparison is something of a stretch).

It sees the poet go back to the year her parents met, five years before Olds herself was born. Knowing the trouble that lay ahead in their marriage, and the effect that would have on Olds’ childhood, she wants to reach out and tell them to stop, enjoining them, ‘don’t do it’ because they are no good for each other.

But if they didn’t get together, she would never exist, so she ends up saying nothing to them. Instead, she realises she can take consolation in the fact that she can ‘tell about it’ through her poetry.

3. ‘The Language of the Brag’.

Another classic poem from her debut collection, ‘The Language of the Brag’ addresses male American poets such as Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, announcing that she wants to do ‘what you wanted to do’ and find ‘some epic use’ for her body. Whitman, of course, wrote the celebrated ‘I Sing the Body Electric’; is Olds’ poem the female response to the celebration?

4. ‘True Love’.

Among other things, Sharon Olds is one of the best love poets of the last half-century. More than that, she writes well about sex, as here, in the long, breathlessly liberated sentence describing two people ‘bound’ to one another through friendship. ‘I know where you are / with my eyes closed’: two people bound together ‘with huge invisible threads’. Beautiful.

5. ‘Rite of Passage’.

This poem shows Olds’ ability to home in on a fairly ordinary domestic scene – here, her young son’s birthday party – and tease out the darker undercurrents she can already perceive.

However, these darker aspects are shot through with grim humour: the notion of her seven-year-old son proclaiming to his friends that they could easily kill a two-year-old, for instance, wryly hints at how older boys, still some years off adulthood, talk themselves up as bigger and more powerful than they are.

6. ‘To You, from Your Secret Admirer’.

This poem immediately wrongfoots us, beginning as if the speaker of the poem is addressing a lover. But ‘secret admirer’ in the title provides a clue: the conversations she has are with herself and nobody else, as she imagines the things she would say to the one she loves, after they have made love.

But is ‘love’ really the word for what she feels? It sounds more like lust twinned with a (mild, or not so mild?) obsession, as the poem develops …

7. ‘After Making Love in Winter’.

The title of this powerful poem – one of Olds’ finest about the erotic side of love – says it all: initially feeling intensely cold after making love in the depths of winter, the speaker can still feel the heat at those points where ‘our bodies touch like / blooms of fire’.

8. ‘The Planned Child’.

Most people, upon learning they were a ‘mistake’ whom their parents conceived by accident, feel disheartened by the revelation that their arrival in the world wasn’t planned. This poem takes the opposite view: in learning that her conception was planned in a methodical, almost cold manner, the speaker blanches at the fact.

It takes a comment from her lover, who remarks that it was obvious she was a child who was ‘wanted’, to make her see things differently and feel that her mother could not live without her in her life.

9. ‘Mother’.

Here’s another poem Sharon Olds wrote about her mother, a devout woman who was in thrall to ‘three fathers’: her own, her husband (Sharon Olds’ father), and God the Father. But here, the poet celebrates her mother as a ‘Druid mother’, a kind of pagan figure born of the trees and the natural world.

10. ‘His Stillness’.

Let’s conclude with a poem Olds wrote about her father, focusing on the moment when he was told by the doctor that he was dying of a terminal illness. Olds recalls how, contrary to her expectations, her father remained completely still when he was told this, like ‘a holy man’ and ‘with the dignity of a foreign leader’.

The poem unsentimentally yet touchingly recounts how the poet came to realise she had lived her whole life up until that point without really knowing her father, and the dignity he was capable of.

These are just a few of Sharon Olds’ many remarkable poems. Her work is known for its emotional depth (and charge), and the way she handles challenging themes while also shining a light on those ‘small beauties’.