Sharon Olds: the Poetry Challenge

I chose Sharon Olds for my first poet in the Poetry Challenge just because the volume of her 'Selected Poems' was on my bedside table. I was first introduced to Sharon Olds' poetry by a friend. Then I heard her read last year at the Wordsworth Trust and I liked the way she opened the reading with two poems by someone else she wanted to share. Few poets do this because it means there's less time for their own work. She was quiet - tall, grey haired, self-effacing, dressed rather drably. But when she began to read, it was the words that took centre stage. Her poems, unlike herself, are bold and assertive. Also unlike her public persona, they are all about herself - the 'I' word is at the centre of every poem. This is her territory.

There's a lot more humour than I expected, like the wry ending of 'My Father Snoring',

'.........He lay like a felled
beast all night and sounded his thick
buried stoppered call, like a cry for
help. And no one ever came:
there were none of his kind around there anywhere.'

But what first got Sharon Olds noticed, was her capacity for 'Writing the Body' and writing about forbidden things. Not necessarily forbidden in terms of censorship, but things that poets didn't write about and women didn't talk publicly (or often privately) about. Menstruation, rape, miscarriage, contraception and sex. It takes courage to write about the things we all think about or speculate about, but prefer not to admit. There's a poem where she imagines her parents' wedding night, another where she catches a glimpse of her father's penis. Then there is the surprise and pathos of 'The Connoiseuse of Slugs'. I found a wonderful reading of it (by a man) on You Tube.

These are passionate intimate poems - with such nakedness the reader becomes a voyeur - party to Olds' most private moments, which are often sexual. One of the best erotic descriptions of love making in either prose or poetry is in 'You Kindly'. In 'Adolescence' she writes about the first fumbling horrors of contraception, with the wit of hindsight. The graphic images in 'Miscarriage' are balanced by the delicate observation:

'A month later/our son was conceived, and I never went back/to mourn the one who came as far as the /sill with its information: that we could/botch something, you and I.'

But 'The Language of the Brag' was the poem I kept going back to, with its long, Whitmanesque lines, following the conventions of the 'heroic brag', but using it to put a woman's achievement in giving birth to another human being, up there, equal to all the other heroic achievements of men.

'I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around

my belly big with cowardice and safety,
stool charcoal from the iron pills,
huge breasts leaking colostrum,
legs swelling, hands swelling,
face swelling and reddening, hair
falling out, inner sex
stabbed again and again with pain like a knife.
I have lain down.

I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and shit and water and
slowly alone in the centre of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.'

If I have a criticism of this selection, it is because there are too many poems on the death of her father. By the sheer weight of numbers they tip the balance in one direction. Her troubled relationship with her father - both before and after her parents' divorce - has obviously been of great importance in her life, but I could have done with fewer poems. In 'Beyond Harm' the last lines point up the difficulty of their relationship. As Olds' father lay dying, just before he sank into coma, he told her that he loved her, a statement she had never felt able to rely on and couldn't even then.

'......Right up to the last
moment, I could make some mistake, offend him, and with
one of his old mouths of disgust he could re-
skew my life. I did not think of it,
I was helping to take care of him,
wiping his face and watching him.
But then, a while after he died,
I suddenly thought, with amazement, he will always
love me now, and I laughed - he was dead, dead!'

Olds' poetry reminds me of Anne Sexton - but these poems are forensic rather than neurotic. She examines the interior landscape of her own body with the rigour of a scientist, adding the sense of wonder you'd expect from an explorer who has just landed on the shores of an undiscovered country. She dissects flesh and bone like an anatomist, analyses emotions like wiring diagrams, showing you just how, exactly, it all works.

And the poems are structured with the same precision - the rhythms carrying you unobtrusively, relentlessly through the poem, with the stresses falling in all the important places, making you look at words you might otherwise have glanced over, revealing meanings you'd never have guessed at.

But I did wonder how her partners or her children felt about being written about so graphically - you can't write truthfully about your own life without also exposing others. Do you have the right to make their lives public too?

I sometimes found the subject matter unsettling, but the writing is wonderful - two or three of the poems (the Language of the Brag for instance) were worth the whole book.

'I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.'

Sharon Olds talking about her poetry.

Philip Hoare - The Search for Moby Dick

Leviathan - or the Whale

I found a review of this book on someone else's bookblog and realised that it was a book I really wanted to read, so I bought it to take on holiday with me. Then, by a complete coincidence, when I arrived in Italy and went out for a drink in my favourite Piazza, I found that they were hosting a sculpture exhibition that was all about whales. The exhibition was completely in tune with the book, since it focussed on man's exploitation of the animal.







Three fibreglass minke whales hung from a gibbet and a gigantic blue whale swam across the marble paving, pulled on a rope behind a small girl. The message was very clear.


Philip Hoare's book, Leviathan, won the BBC Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction this year and absolutely deserves the award. It is profound, beautifully written, exhaustively researched, and manages to achieve the impossible - to be both readable and as complex as its subject. Philip tells the story of mankind's relationship with the whale - from the mythical and mystical animal of ancient stories, to the commercial object of modern times. Herman Melville's Moby Dick is the central thread of his narrative, but round it is woven everything we know or have heard about the Whale. The book is a very personal journey for Philip Hoare, who has been obessed by whales since he was a child, perhaps, he writes, the result of almost being born under water - his mother having gone into labour on a submarine.

His descriptions of the wholesale slaughter of whales in the twentieth century is stomach churning (more whales were killed in 1951 alone than in the entire preceding hundred and fifty), but his account of swimming with whales off the islands of the Azores moved me to tears. Why do whales evoke such a response in so many of us? Is it just their massive size? The mystery of their hidden lives in the vast depths of the world's oceans? The empathy of one intelligent mammal for another?(the human race hasn't been renowned for too much of that). Or is it something much more primeval? Something in the whale's song that echoes far back in our own evolution? Whales are old, much older than our own species.

Philip Hoare points up the paradoxes - the Hubble telescope looking back at the origins of the universe on machinery lubricated by spermaceti oil; space probes programmed to play whale song far out into the cosmic night; the fact that a quarter of a million whales are still killed every year, some of them supposedly for food - though the whales they catch have flesh too polluted to eat. Many whale species now have breeding pools too small to regenerate. We have managed, in two hundred years, to wipe out something that evolution spent a billion creating.

This book is a celebration of one of the greatest species ever to live on earth, and a savage critique of the way humanbeings treat those who share the planet with us.

Recommended Reading

I'm always interested in other people's holiday reading. One of my co-habitees at Peralta is reading himself into the heart of American history, engrossed in Derek Robinson's novel Kentucky Blues - set in the town of Rock Springs, and spanning a time scale from the 1820s to the present day, through the Civil War and the birth of the Klu Klux Klan. It’s told tersely, with black humour and its inhabitants are described as ‘the authentic ancestors of Jerry Springer’s guests’. I liked the spare style, as in this desription of the onset of winter. ‘In December the skies turned to blue, frost struck, and mud turned to brown.’

He's also brought Isabella Bird's 'In the Rocky Mountains' urged on him by a girl friend. Isabella Bird, born in the 1830s, was the daughter of a clergyman who went abroad for her health and became an intrepid, emancipated traveller, going to Persia, Australia, Hawai, Japan, Kurdistan, Tibet, Korea and China, at a time when women didn't go anywhere much and certainly not on their own.

He also has another book, which really fascinated me, and which I've made a note to get hold of as soon as I get home. It’s a collection of the photography of Edward Curtis, who spent his life recording , in photographs and text, the final days of the native American Indians - images of their faces, and their daily lives accompanied by a unique record of their stories and traditions. Initially JP Morgan paid for his work, but after a bitter divorce from his wife Clara, Curtis lost the rights to his own negatives and had a lot of financial problems. He almost killed himself dedicating 30 years of his life to this project. But without him we simply would have no record of these people who were so casually displaced. By the time an exhausted Curtis died, most of the native Americans were dead too, the rest corralled into 'reserves'.

An Equal Stillness

This is another first novel - Francesca Kay was the winner of the Orange Prize for new writers in 2009. At first glance the structure could be a bit of a cliche. An Equal Stillness opens with the funeral of a famous artist, attended by family members. Someone suggests that the narrator should write her biography and, after initially demurring, the anonymous narrator is persuaded to do so. 'Write the life, they urged me, even at her graveside; no one but you should do it. Who better? You with your command of words, and besides, you were the closest.' Apart from the first and last pages, the life story of Jennet Mallow is told in third person, impersonal mode as if it were a real biography. This device enables the novelist to take an overview of the life, compressing long periods of time into short sections of narrative and it also allows for authorial reflection. The identity of the author/narrator isn't disclosed until the end.

I read the book in one sitting - which says a lot for its readability - and was engrossed by the story of Jennet Mallow, a gifted painter, born at the end of the first world war, who has to struggle for recognition despite unhelpful parents, an early accidental pregnancy, an alcoholic husband and a daughter damaged at birth. Jennet Mallow discovers that, in order to succeed as an artist, you have to be selfish and that runs counter to everything that is drummed into women from birth and then reinforced by cultural stereotypes. Women are the carers, the enablers, the ones who make sacrifices. But, somehow, like many other painters and writers, Jennet manages to juggle home and artistic career, though there are casualties among her children and her lovers.

The biography is somehow less critical than it could be - difficult questions are avoided. This is a romantic viewpoint and - again - the impersonal biographical device allows it. I kept wishing for something more profound which could only have come from writing the novel from Jennet Mallow's own perspective. There is some beautiful prose in this book - sections of pure poetry. It is all very beautiful, balanced, elegant, crafted perfectly to arrive at the final lines - 'Life and death. For that one moment, time suspended, the length of a single held breath, like the spaces between brush strokes, like the sea and land in balance at slack water, in an equal stillness, life and death.' Shame on me to crave a few waves, an altogether stormier sea. This is definitely an author to watch out for.

Night Train to Lisbon

Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier
There are lots of different reasons why a book fails to delight. Four principal ones are:
a) It's the wrong book for the reader
b) The reader fails to understand something fundamental to the book
c) The writer fails to communicate something fundamental
d) The reader's expectations aren't in tune with what the writer is delivering.
I haven't decided which category this novel should be in yet.

I bought the novel because Waterstones had a 'three for two' offer and, having gone in to buy two novels in a hurry, this seemed an intriguing third. I had enjoyed Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind (which has a similar plot thread) and Sansom's Winter in Madrid, so I suppose I was on an Iberian trail. I love mysteries and I love books about books, so it seemed ideal, but, when I finally got round to opening Night Train to Lisbon, I found the central plot strand tenuous and too like other books I've read recently - Shadow of the Wind obviously, but also Homecoming by Bernard Schlink (author of The Reader) which has the same central theme - a lost book that leads the main character to some strange discoveries about his family origins. Homecoming is much tighter and more absorbing (and more profound) than this. Then there's The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - a gothic novel with a strong narrative drive, that retells the story of Vlad the Impaler from a new perspective. Finally there's The New Life by Orhan Pamuk, which I found very difficult to read and eventually abandoned. But they all celebrate the book as a magic artefact that will whisk the reader away on an enchanted (and sometimes perilous) journey.

In fact Night Train to Lisbon's whole plot could be summed up by the first line of the Orhan Pamuk - "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." Jolted out of his routine by a Portuguese woman who appears to be about to commit suicide, Gregorius - a scholar of ancient languages - abandons his students, and goes into a bookshop to buy a book in Portuguese. He finds a privately published volume by Amadeu de Prado, which engrosses him so utterly he takes a train to Lisbon where he begins to track down the writer and the characters in the memoir.

Pascal Mercier is a professor of philosophy and there are long sections, purporting to be written by de Prado, which discuss the nature of fear, the reliability of memory, our relationships and the very meaning of existence. I enjoyed reading it, though I got rather bored with the philosophical sections after a while and disappointed when the search didn't really arrive anywhere. It all seemed rather pointless - true the classics professor learned things about himself as he unravelled the story of Amadeu de Prado, but that alone was not rewarding enough for a reader who has ploughed through more than three hundred pages in a state of hopefulness. I was left without satisfactory information about some of the key individuals in de Prado's story - the hero/narrator fails to engage properly with the other characters, remaining an observer and recorder, and what seem to be crucial plot strands are never tied up and remain dangling and there are too many coincidences. At the end the reader is left at the door of the clinic where Gregorius is about to undergo some tests, without a single hint as to whether the results are going to alter the fabric of his life in any way. Nothing was resolved and there was 'no closure' as they would say across the Pond.

But, even though I found the ending flawed, the book interested me and it is certainly a serious 'novel of ideas' as the jacket promises - and there is some good writing, a rare enough treat these days. I don't feel guilty about giving away the plot or the ending, because neither are vital to a reading of this novel - it's all about process and the accumulation of knowledge, about the choices we make when deciding how to live our lives. It's not about fate or circumstance, the novelist seems to be saying - it's down to us.

The Poetry Challenge

I've taken up the poetry challenge - I have to read a collection of poetry by a different poet every month for twelve months and review it on my blog. I already read loads of poetry anyway, but I want to take part publicly because anything that encourages people to read more poetry is a good thing. You're not allowed to include anthologies - each collection has to be by an individual poet - and there has to be variety as well as cultural diversity. You have to include male and female, national and international, public post award holders (poets laureate etc) as well as lesser known names. The idea is to move out of your 'comfort zone'. So I'm starting with Sharon Olds' Selected Poems, because that's the book that's on my bedside table at the moment, and I'm looking forward to finding new poets I wouldn't otherwise have read. This is going to be fun!

For full details read 18th August entry on www.bookgazing.blogspot.com
Image: Joel Harrison, ‘grace 2’ (2005) Auckland University, NZ