One Secret Thing

One Secret Thing

Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony.<br><br>The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humor, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy—sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger—public and private—illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. <i>One Secret Thing </i>is charged throughout with Sharon Olds’s characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.<br><br>The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his<br>first rotation in the emergency room.<br>On the ancient boarding-school radio,<br>in the attic hall, the announcer had given my<br>boyfriend’s name as one of two<br>brought to the hospital after the sunrise<br>service, the egg-hunt, the crash—one of them<br>critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the<br>stairwell banisters, at their lathing,<br>the necks and knobs like joints and bones,<br>the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had said<br><i>Which one of them died, </i>and now the world was<br>an ant’s world: the huge crumb of each<br>second thrown, somehow, up onto<br>my back, and the young, tired voice<br>said my fresh love’s name.<br><br><i>from </i>“Easter 1960”