Balladz by Sharon Olds (Jonathan Cape, £12)
“Climbing the stairs, slowly, on my palms / … / how much difference is there, anymore, / between me and a cadaver?” Judging by the now 80-year-old Sharon Olds’s new collection, the answer is: a lot. Across five parts the book covers the death of her partner, spending the first Covid quarantine alone and a tribute to Emily Dickinson in the form of Amherst Balladz. Olds’s familiar subjects of family, sex and the body are here, but also an awareness of her privilege: “For a moment the core of my life / was not desire, but the knowledge of my unearned luck.” Drawing on an unflinching interrogation of the self, these poems pulse with an energy that is thoroughly alive.
