One Secret Thing – Sharon Olds

One Secret Thing is a book that sits in the back of your mind and just refuses to leave it.  Sharon Olds manages to encapsulate a surprisingly varied range of emotions from childlike witticism as in “Diagnosis” to the more morose and adult poems later in the book such as “Last Hour.”  The book has almost too varied a scope to be sufficiently analyzed within a mere review, but I will try to get across the general opinion that this book left me with.  Are you ready for it?

Like I mentioned earlier, this book has been stuck in the back of my mind for the past two weeks since I’ve read through it.  Most notable are the strong beginning and ending sections that bookend the work.  The book opens with a section entitled “War” and describes, in vivid detail, snapshots from war.  The Poem “His Crew” was the one that I kept returning to, and still do as I am writing this review.  The closing image of a pilot crashing his crippled plane into the earth “green as a great basin of water/ being lifted to his face” leaves me with a feeling I have a hard time putting into words.  The last section describes the last moments of the speaker’s mother’s life.  It begins with a slow pace setting the scene of the mother having a stroke and falling into a coma in “Still Life,” (Check out that link for a live reading of that poem) but from the moment the doctor briefly enters the scene long enough to say that she has hours left to live in “The Last Evening” the poems begin to build the suspense leading to the inevitable conclusion.  Each poem moves a step towards that final ending and, after the fact, moves along after it to the final goodbye within “Nereid Elegy.”  But unlike the Nick Flynn book Some Ether, this ends on an uplifting hopeful note as the speaker “let her go,/ we ushered her forth, like the death of a god,/ the birth of an exhausted holiday.”  Death brings the end to the long “holiday” the mother had enjoyed on earth.

Now, all the positives aside, I only really have one negative to speak of and it concerns the middle of the book between the two previously discussed sections.  This area is mixed up and has a general sense of disorder and confusion.  I’ll be honest, before this recent reading of the book in its entirety I had started reading and stopped halfway through multiple times because it really wasn’t speaking too much to me.  That said though, there are a few gems within.  One of these, “Freezer,” brought some contention between myself and some friends.  I, for one, love this poem with its opening line “When I think of people who kill and eat people,/ I think of how lonely my mother was.”  I mean come on… if that doesn’t draw you into a poem I don’t know what will.  My friend argued that the rest of the poem dealt with sexual assault, and I’ll confess that perhaps without reading the rest of the book the poem may come off that way.  But when understanding the relationship between the mother and daughter from the other poems… and not choosing to have a mind in the gutter… it comes off as a daughter curious about what it would be like to grow up.

Now, I could go on and on describing the intricacies of this book and the other little nuggets of wisdom that inhabit it, but honestly you need to experience some of it for yourself… plus I don’t have the time.  If you have some time to dedicate and the willpower to push through a sometimes ‘so-so’ middle to the amazing finish, then do yourself a favor and check this one out.

Final Verdict:

3/4 – Worth checking out

ODE TO MY SOCKS – Pablo Neruda (Stephen Mitchell translation)

As I mentioned in a tweet, I’ve got a lot of work going on in classes this semester, so I will be a little delayed in my next review of poetry: Sharon Olds’ One Secret Thing. To bridge the gap between reviews I decided to post up one of my favorite Pablo Neruda poems, with the translation from Stephen Mitchell.  There are other translations, but this one has the best quality in my opinion.
Enjoy,
Combat Steve

ODE TO MY SOCKS

Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
which she knitted with her own
sheepherder hands,
two socks as soft
as rabbits.
I slipped my feet
into them
as if they were
two
cases
knitted
with threads of
twilight
and the pelt of sheep.

Outrageous socks,
my feet became
two fish
made of wool,
two long sharks
of ultramarine blue
crossed
by one golden hair,
two gigantic blackbirds,
two cannons:
my feet
were honored
in this way
by
these
heavenly
socks.
They were
so beautiful
that for the first time
my feet seemed to me
unacceptable
like two decrepit
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that embroidered
fire,
of those luminous
socks.

Nevertheless,
I resisted
the sharp temptation
to save them
as schoolboys
keep
fireflies,
as scholars
collect
sacred documents,
I resisted
the wild impulse
to put them
in a golden
cage
and each day give them
birdseed
and chunks of pink melon.
Like explorers
in the jungle
who hand over the rare
green deer
to the roasting spit
and eat it
with remorse,
I stretched out
my feet
and pulled on
the
magnificent
socks
and
then my shoes.

And the moral of my ode
is this:
beauty is twice
beauty
and what is good is doubly
good
when it’s a matter of two
woolen socks
in winter.