9780679765608

Sharon Olds's dazzling new collection is a sequence of poems that reaches into the very wellspring of life. The poems take us back to the womb, and from there on to childhood, to a searing sexual awakening, to the shock of childbirth, to the wonder and humor of parenthood--and, finally, to the depths of adult love. Always bold, musical, honest, these poems plunge us into the essence of experience. This is a highly charged, beautifully organized collection from one of the finest poets writing today.

Sharon Olds was born in 1942, in San Francisco, and was educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her poetry has won both the Lamont Poetry Selection and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and in the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York.

Part 1

Visiting My Mother's College

3

(1)

My Parents' Wedding Night, 1937

4

(1)

The Planned Child

5

(1)

Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942

6

(1)

Earliest Momory

7

(1)

My First Weeks

8

(2)

For My Mother

10

(1)

The Lisp

11

(1)

Christian Child

12

(3)

Killing My Sister's Fish

15

(1)

The Swimming Race

16

(1)

Parents' Day

17

(1)

Dirty Memories

18

(2)

Mrs. Krikorian

20

(5)

Part 2

Necking

25

(2)

First

27

(2)

Adolescence

29

(1)

Early Images of Heaven

30

(1)

Celibacy at Twenty

31

(2)

The Source

33

(2)

Making Love

35

(1)

I Love It When

36

(1)

The Dragons

37

(1)

After Making Love in Winter

38

(1)

May 1968

39

(4)

Part 3

First Birth

43

(1)

Her First Week

44

(1)

Bathing the New Born

45

(1)

History of Medicine

46

(2)

Milk-Bubble Ruins

48

(1)

Socks

49

(1)

A Mother at the End of June

50

(1)

Twelve Years Old

51

(1)

The Hand

52

(2)

Good Will

54

(1)

Lament

55

(1)

Poem to Our Son After a High Fever

56

(2)

Prayer During That Time

58

(1)

Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil

59

(1)

The Cast

60

(1)

The Siblings

61

(1)

Love's Eyesight

62

(1)

The Transformed Boy

63

(1)

The Last Birthday at Home

64

(1)

Solo

65

(1)

Physics

66

(1)

My Son the Man

67

(1)

First Formal

68

(1)

The Ordeal

69

(1)

The Lady Bug

70

(2)

The Bonding

72

(1)

High School Senior

73

(1)

The Pediatrician Retires

74

(5)

Part 4

This Hour

79

(2)

His Father's Cadaver

81

(2)

West

83

(1)

Lifelong

84

(1)

Full Summer

85

(1)

Last Night

86

(1)

Am and Am Not

87

(1)

True Love

88

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Bathing the New Born

I love with an almost fearful love
to remember the first baths I gave him--
our second child, our first son--
I laid the little torso along
my left forearm, nape of the neck
in the crook of my elbow, hips nearly as
small as a least tern's hips
against my wrist, thigh held loosely
in the loop of thumb and forefinger,
the sign that means exactly right. I'd soap him,
the long, violet, cold feet,
the scrotum wrinkled as a waved whelk shell
so new it was flexible yet, the chest,
the hands, the clavicles, the throat, the gummy
furze of the scalp. When I got him too soapy he'd
slide in my grip like an armful of buttered
noodles, but I'd hold him not too tight,
I felt that I was good for him,
I'd tell him about his wonderful body
and the wonderful soap, and he'd look up at me,
one week old, his eyes still wide
and apprehensive. I love that time
when you croon and croon to them, you can see
the calm slowly entering them, you can
sense it in your clasping hand,
the little spine relaxing against
the muscle of your forearm, you feel the fear
leaving their bodies, he lay in the blue
oval plastic baby tub and
looked at me in wonder and began to
move his silky limbs at will in the water.

Excerpted from The Wellspring: Poems by Sharon Olds
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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The Wellspring

The Wellspring

0679765603

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