"Because Sharon Olds has been publishing for forty years and because her work has drawn so much attention," opines Forrest Gander, "both disparaging and laudatory, most people I know already have decided attitudes towards her work . . . One Secret Thing, her new cycle of family poems (Knopf 2008) includes some intensely moving poems . . .."
It was like witnessing the earth being formed,
to see my mother die, like seeing
the dry lands be separated
from the oceans, and all the mists bear up
on one side, and all the solids
be borne down, on the other, until
the body was all there, all bronze and
petrified redwood opal, and the soul all
gone . . .
— Sharon Olds, "To See My Mother"
IMO, Irving Layton created the definitive poem concerning the devastation the death of one's mother wreaks (and, again IMO, the following eight lines prove same):
When I saw my mother's head on the cold pillow,
Her white waterfalling hair in the cheeks' hollows,
I thought, quietly circling my grief, of how
She had loved God but cursed extravagantly his creatures.
For her final mouth was not water but a curse,
A small black hole, a black rent in the universe,
Which damned the green earth, stars, and trees in its stillness
And the inescapable lousiness of growing old . . .
— Irving Layton, "Keine Lazarovitch 1870-1959"
(Of course, you may attempt to convince me otherwise; I've always been open that way.)
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