Life, Death, and Everything In Between: Reading Sharon Olds
By Audrey Treon
“For women to make their way in the world, it is necessary to destroy, Woolf believed, but also to build; to fragment, but also to link.”
The first weekend of August, I visited my sister, Ellie, in San Francisco. She took me to her favorite haunts — the French bakery down her street, a New York-style Italian restaurant with a waitress who embodied the woman I hope to be in my sixties, leafy parks, incredibly good Thai restaurants, and, of course, bookstores.
Ellie eventually led me to the legendary City Lights. The air inside was hot and sticky, thickened by the press of bodies weaving carefully around one another, each trying not to block anyone’s browsing. I drifted upstairs to the “Poetry Room” and “Beat Literature” section and immediately scanned the shelves for the “O”s — searching for none other than Sharon Olds.
Photo by Ruven Afanador; Courtesy of The New York Times
My first introduction to Olds’ poetry was through her 1980 collection, Satan Says. I purchased it for $8 on ThriftBooks after seeing it advertised on the website — the title made it hard for me to walk away from the book. A week later, it arrived in the mail, and I started reading my first collection of poetry.
The first poem, eponymously titled Satan Says, is a macabre, intense portrait of the darkness and love that can infest a family. The diction grabs the reader violently, passionately, and even after the words release you from their grip, the first page stays with you, like the imprint of a hand on the flesh of your neck.
I own three books by Olds and recently finished reading my second one, The Dead and the Living. I started it while sitting under the warm sun in Dolores Park. The warm air and green grass beneath my limbs served as a soft, comforting backdrop to the grim themes explored in the poems. It was a perfect juxtaposition — I was surrounded by the living: dogs playing fetch, friends enjoying an afternoon joint; a collective appreciation of life was felt throughout, silent yet palpable.
And still, there was death. All around us, moving through the air, on the screens of our phones, in our hearts, taking control of our darkest anxieties, ones that you can’t rationalize your way out of.
An excerpt from Things That Are Worse Than Death in The Dead and the Living:
“…And nothing I experienced was worse than death, / life was beautiful as our blood on the stone floor / to save us that — my son’s eyes on me, / my eyes on my son — the ram-boar on our bodies / making us look at our old enemy and bow in welcome, gracious and eternal death / who permits departure.” (Olds, lines 17–23)
Nothing the narrator experienced was worse than death — death was a respite, and there is a brutally human peace in that. In the broader scope of the poem, a story is told about the horrific human rights abuses suffered by Chileans under Pinochet’s dictatorial rule. Olds starts the poem factually, with the line “You are speaking of Chile.” What continues is an atrocious telling of the torture of two parents and their five-year-old son. The poem is dedicated to Margaret Randall, an American writer and activist who spent years in countries experiencing turmoil. The Poetry Foundation writes that “Many of her books are attempts to understand how socialist revolutionary societies intersect, or fail to intersect, with feminism…” Olds, Randall, and the victims of Pinochet are all important identities in this poem — it would not hold the same weight without any one of them.
While researching the poem, I came across an article entitled “I used to laugh at my Chilean father’s paranoia about life in the U.S. — not anymore,” written by Stacy Torres for The Guardian. In the article, Torres parallels Chile, the present-day U.S., and Israel regarding human rights atrocities committed by these countries’ militaries and supporters. Olds wrote the poem in 2003. How stark it is to realize the status quo has stayed the same — and worsened.
Sharon Olds captures the hostile realities that infest our world, and she does it beautifully, with nothing but the written word. But perhaps that is incorrect, because the written word is far from nothing. By this medium, she crawled into the crevices that people only dare to enter. I picture her writhing around — like a baby learning to walk, unsure of their limbs, with infinite curiosity about what the world holds. This baby, this poet, stands — and stands tall. She takes up space in the sticky, dark membrane of humanity, and does so fearlessly. Through this stance, she lets her readers explore these places.
I am now making my way through Stag’s Leap and will continue to look out for the last name “Olds” among the lined-up book spines. The poetry of Sharon Olds has transformed me and continues to do so every day. Written in the second-hand copy of Satan Says is “Cheers!” followed by “Sharon Olds, April 91.” I often think about whoever gave and received this book. I like that it ended up in my hands. Perhaps “Cheers” is too joyful a word for the nature of Olds’ poetry, but I take it as an invitation to the complex world led by Sharon Olds.
