It's interesting to hear an Olds' poem described as having "deft" line breaks... But I do agree that when Olds hits a note, as she did for me most explicitly in the Gold Cell (and in those last lines above), the note resonates long and deep, and certainly raises the ante on what we are willing to see and reveal.

Thank you for making a post about Sharon's new book. I agree her work is beautiful and moving, and it's been essential poetry for me for a long time. I'm glad to see a blog on Harriet about her.

Sina--
re: Olds' line breaks. I agree it's unusual to talk about Olds' line-breaks as deft, but I think they are deft in a sense, not that they are clickingly discreet entities inside a larger entity, or that they make stunning enjambments or interruptions, or display great wit, but because they do exactly the work they need to in an Olds poem, which is to stay somewhat out of the way of the poem's intense *about-ness*, to make themselves a non-issue, except when they spotlight certain end-words like, as in the poem above, "to see my mother die, like seeing" which makes the mother's death and seeing itself somewhat equivalent...
among others.
Daisy

daisy's "deft" is right, to my mind . . .

I think Olds is a great poet, and her "Selected Poems" a few
years back should have won all the awards . . .

part of what makes her great is her craft—

her skills are handtooled unique—

"they do exactly the work they need to"

as daisy insightfully phrases it . . .

what works for her is what she worked for,

the Olds flow,

the Olds enjambement, the pauses and clauses, the

effective use of internal rhymes and

all—her technique is to envy for.

...

Daisy,
I agree, yes, it's not about the line breaks with Olds. It seems so old fashioned to even think about line breaks these days, but they still excite me.

>they still excite me

Me too.
D.

I'm behind an Olds book or two. I enjoy her work, although it often makes me roll my eyes. She is a poet of excess, which is honorable, I think.

"To See My Mother" is lush, wild, presumptuous, flagrant, and touching, like a talented drag artist who shows you the poignancy of being human, the impossibility of merely two genders, Olds here birthing and deathing with a similar exuberance.

Olds can be campy in a bad way, too. Really amazingly bad. But I think the "amazing" is the key. Even her bad poems have a delicious outrageousness to them. They don't cross their knees demurely under calf-length skirts.