One Secret Thing

Condition - Very Good
The item shows wear from consistent use, but it remains in good condition and functions properly. Item may arrive with damaged packaging or be repackaged. It may be marked, have identifying markings on it, or have minor cosmetic damage. It may also be missing some parts/accessories or bundled items.

One Secret Thing

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 humor, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energyâ€”sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and dangerâ€”public and privateâ€”illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Oldsâ€™s characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.

The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his
first rotation in the emergency room.
On the ancient boarding-school radio,
in the attic hall, the announcer had given my
boyfriendâ€™s name as one of two
brought to the hospital after the sunrise
service, the egg-hunt, the crashâ€”one of them
critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the
stairwell banisters, at their lathing,
the necks and knobs like joints and bones,
the varnish here thicker here thinnerâ€”I had said
Which one of them died, and now the world was
an antâ€™s world: the huge crumb of each
second thrown, somehow, up onto
my back, and the young, tired voice
said my fresh loveâ€™s name.

from â€œEaster 1960â€

Country	USA
Author	Sharon Olds
Binding	Paperback
EAN	9780375711770
Edition	1st
ISBN	0375711775
Label	Knopf
Manufacturer	Knopf
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	112
PublicationDate	2008-09-30
Publisher	Knopf
ReleaseDate	2008-09-30
Studio	Knopf

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