Stag's Leap: Poems Kindle Edition

I really like this poet, who writes in a form I call "narrative poetry" that reels me in every time. My particular favorite in this collection was "The Healers" though many rang and sang to my interior chords. I expect to be reading more of Sharon Olds!

The poems are very personal but powerful with elegant language and allusions to the classics. We read Stag's Leap in our Tuesday Morning Book Group. Our instructor, Dr. Emily Auerbach, converted the poem Tiny Siren to prose which we read out loud. We then read the poem as written and the difference was astounding. As a poem each word was infused with meaning and we felt intimate with the words. As prose it was as if the psychic distance was huge and the meaning more illusive.Yet, I also wanted to know his side of the story. Olds' gives us the impression she was completely innocent and surprised by her husband finding someone else. In thirty years time people do drift apart but it is rarely a surprise.Everyone that has experienced grief should read Stag's Leap.

Sharon paints a picture of togetherness and separation, dependence, and freedom, using her tears.Brilliant work.

Incredible feat of poetry. Absolutely captivating from cover to cover.

If you’ve been cheated on, this book is spot on with the pain.

Stag’s Leap is a beautiful homage to the raw grief of betrayal and the “tearing” apart of a life and the healing afterwards.

I usually struggle with freer verse forms: Lawrence and Plath and Eliot hold me, not much else. I'm suspicious of the confessional mode too as a rule. But this book breaks right through my old fashioned notions, and pulls me right into the authors emotions, or presentation of emotion. She approaches the pain and the processes of being left from a set of varying angles, many of the startling, and the final impression is one of a, sometimes painful integrity.She is a master of language for sure, read on the metro or aloud at night the poems balance the tension between verse form and the demands of the sentence beautifully, and wonderful images and turns of phrase are every where.Fair to say I am seriously impressed with this collection and I don't recall that last time I was so moved by a book of contemporary verse.This is special.

I recently read this while going through my own divorce. It was truly moving and relatable.

Another friend recommendation. Stag’s Leap is a collection of poems by the hugely talented Sharon Olds. I didn’t want to read this, as a close friend is currently experiencing similar circumstances, but I’m so glad I did. Even reading the sample on Amazon had me welling up with tears.Olds explores the end of her thirty-year marriage with such skin-stripped truth and agonising imagery, it feels like a kind of therapy in itself. Somehow, The Arrival and Stag’s Leap touch on connected themes – how to adapt to changed circumstances, how to change and how to remain oneself.Olds rips her heart out and lays it in a stainless steel bowl for us to observe. The process of separation and recovery is deeply, viscerally touching, and if – like me – you’re partial to walking into the sea and crying salt into salt, this cathartic experience will both empty and arm you.

A friend recommended Sharon Olds poetry but warned me about the subject matter i.e. heartbreak! I just read a couple at a time - I cried a lot and although it is very painful to experience her heartbreak when her husband falls in love with 'a. n. other' and relive one's own pain in past relationship breakdowns she always manages to say something profound and true about love. It is the fact that she describes the joy of love so exactly that makes the end so very painful, as in 'unspeakable''to stand in his thirty-year ' When he loved me, I lookedsight, and not in love's sight out at the world as if from inside'I feel an invisibility'Or as in' The Flurry' I tell him I will try to fall out oflove with him, but I feel I will love himall my life'I cannot recommend this poetry highly enough - read her and recognise your own heartbreak - it is a genuinely cathartic experience for those of us burned by love and loss .

Beautifully crafted poems, so much so you could run them through your fingers, some flow, others snag, which is good. Brave and bold, as always Sharon Olds tackles what others fear. Honest, or so it seems, account of her marriage break up.... and its aftermath and recovery. Albeit one side of the story, but a rewarding one at that. Particularly admired the poem about telling her Mother about the break up. People are important to her, and I think that's why she resonates with her readership

This small volume swept me off my feet with its waves of familiarity, emotion, questions, recognition.So much to admire and reflect on - not least the smallness of most leavings without the power of the imagination to transform and heal.Stag's Leap reaches largesse, generosity, transformation.An amazing poetic and human achievement, richly deserving of all the accolades and awards.Sharon Olds - hats off to you!

Studying Eng Lit at university put paid to poetry enjoyment for me. This is my first time back to poetry in 20 years and it doesn't disappoint. An easy narrative style that emerses the reader - no jolting phrases rammed in to make the metre work. One big narrative presented in short poem 'chapters' makes this both compulsive and easy reading. Finally, for a book about the break up of a life-long relationship, it manages to be both realistic and uplifting.