One Secret Thing

By Sharon Olds

(Knopf, 2008)

In her ninth collection of poetry, English professor and former New York State Poet Laureate Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book rich with self-awareness and a sense of irony.  She depicts the traumas of her first decades with undeniable force, writing of sex, remembered pain, parenthood, the dramatic, abusive household in which she grew up, and her tender relationship with her own daughter.
    Olds also offers poetry of public protest—the book begins with sonnet-sized poems against war. These serve as a prelude to the more personal poems, which gradually reveal her mother’s last years and give us a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning.