One Secret Thing

In One Secret Thing, her ninth collection, Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems.

The book opens with a poem in twelve parts, which focuses on fearsome images of war. This vision of strife between nations is followed by indelible new poems of conflict within a family. Here are poems of home in which anger, joy, danger, and desire sing together with lyric energy—sometimes comic, sometimes with unblinking forgiveness.

The collection in its entirety is intense and harmonic, moving from minor key to major to minor, and it is rich with a level of self-awareness and irony new in Olds’s work. One Secret Thing is a double portrait, of a child and a difficult parent. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning.

One Secret Thing culminates in a series of elegies of hard-won mourning. Throughout, the poems are shot through with Olds’s characteristic passion, zany imagination, and poetic power.