Sharon Olds recently turned 80 and, as one reads her latest collection, one wonders: over a long writing career, do you get to sound more, or less, like yourself? It is inspiring to be able to report that, in Balladz, she proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping. She writes about sex, love and the landscape of the body with zany intimacy. And there is something new here too: a freshly evolved conscience, a chafing sense of her own privilege (New Year’s Song ends: “For a moment the core of my life/ was not desire, but the knowledge of my unearned luck”) and an extended empathy (When I looked out ends: “In my 78th year, my eyes opened/ a little wider to the suffering of others”). Beyond this, she looks mindfully at the planet (in the arresting but bald Ballad Torn Apart).
These poems are a delicate reckoning. Beds and graves feature repeatedly but there is nothing supine about the writing. Her mother shows up a little too often and you might complain that this was the same Olds (we know enough about her mother’s cruelty). Yet perhaps there is no such thing as familiar territory when a mother persists in being a foreign figure in a person’s life. In Genesis, a powerful DIY bible of a poem, Olds releases herself with a valedictory lurch from an imagined scene in which her grandmother declares:
“I will not let thee go, except
thou bless me.” So I blessed my mother’s
mother, and my mother, and they let me go.
Amherst Balladz, a middle section of this collection, is riskily impressive, a homage to the poet Emily Dickinson whose home Olds visits in Amherst. It is written, in as far as is possible, in Dickinson’s style – although that “z” on Balladz stands as a groovily anachronistic disclaimer. Here’s a sample:
Since any – Beauty – I could have –
Would Not be of my Visage –
But drawn or Writ on Paper –
Stricter – Hieroglyph.
Inevitably, for all her skill, Olds cannot duplicate Dickinson’s boundless pain or mystery. She arrives instead at a warm moment of demystification, as she exclaims: “She was a person!” It is fascinating to see America’s most corporeal poet revering America’s most incorporeal.
Olds also includes poems written during the pandemic in which she lives up to her own claim (from Meditation during the Suffering and Deaths of Others): “I think I was born funny – born seeing funny.” There is an especially merry poem, Isolation Liverwurst, about the arrival by post of mayonnaise in lockdown that has her “capering and squeaking” with delight.
But it is the final section, Elegies, which is the most remarkable. She avoids any tiptoeing reverence or the starstruck sense in which death is seen almost as a form of promotion that frequently blights elegies of this kind. She mourns a schoolfriend simply, she searches for the grave of her poet/friend Galway Kinnell in the Vermont mountains and ends comically consoling herself with a pair of his odd socks. But the most heart-stirring poems are about the death of her partner, Carl Wallman, a former cattle breeder. She is at pains not to underplay the reality of his illness. She describes his hospice bed (and climbing into it), looks at his coffin, at the grass and the earth – all present in poems of unshrinking beauty. And in When They Say You Have Maybe Three Months Left, she wonders:
Maybe life is a/ kind of dying. Maybe this has been heaven.
WHEN THEY SAY YOU HAVE MAYBE THREE MONTHS LEFT
In my sleep, I dreamed that I came to your grave –
and what lay between us? The beautiful uncut
hair of the grass, and topsoil like the rich
dirt in which you buried our sheets
after I left you – our DNA – near where
you later buried your golden dog.
Also between us the new ceiling
of plain pine, and the linen garment
your fresh-washed unbreathing body had been clothed in,
and the earthen chamber music of wild,
underworld, spiral creatures,
and your tissue I have loved, and within it the ancient
primordial man of your skeleton.
Narwhal tusk, elephant ivory,
icon of your narrow-hipped male power
I rode, rowing in eden. But
it was no dream, I lay broad waking,
and you have not died yet. I can read this to you
in a week, in front of the woodstove,
the flames curving up to points and disappearing,
or beside the pond, the water rippling,
ovals of hemlock and beech changing places in it.
Sometimes you fall asleep as I’m talking to you.
And you’ve said: I want you to be reading me a poem when I die.
And, Let’s not stop writing to each other when I’m dead.
And when I’m dead too! I said. When we met,
though we fell in love immediate and permanent,
we could not make a two-soul union,
nor when I left – each of us had to
work, on ourselves, for years, to get there.
And now we are there! Maybe this has been
death all along! Maybe life is a
kind of dying. Maybe this has been heaven.
• Balladz by Sharon Olds is published by Jonathan Cape (£12). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
