Gold Cell (Knopf Poetry Series) - Softcover

Olds, Sharon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394747704 ISBN 13: 9780394747705

Publisher: Knopf, 1987

Synopsis

A new collection by the much praised poet whose second book THE DEAD AND THE LIVING, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

About this title

About the Author:

Sharon Olds was born in 1942, in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her first book of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and in the N.Y.U. workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. More recently she was awarded the Walt Whitman Citation for Merit by the New York State Writers Institute of the State University of New York. The citation officially invested her with the title of New York State Poet for 1998-2000.

From Library Journal:

Beneath the surface of life Olds discovers "what all of us want never to know"her own sexuality. Her obsessive descriptions of sex are too candid to be erotic: "the condom/ripped and the seed tore into me like a/ flame." With evocative imagery ("We think about bones twisted like white/ saplings"), Olds searches through "all the eloquence of the body" for the means to assess her roles as daughter, lover, wife, mother, and woman. Despite a too-easy solipsism ("I looked at you and I tell you I knew you were God/ and I was God"), the best poetry occurs when Olds presents moments of awakening as though they had just happenedher baby's arms "bent like a crab's rosy legs, the/ thighs closely-packed plums in heavy syrup." For poet and reader such moments are purifying. Frank Allen, Associate Dean, Continuing Education, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0394747704
• ISBN 13: 9780394747705
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112