Sharon Olds’s Many Small Waves – by Julieta Caldas

Sharon Olds, Arias, Jonathan Cape. Nov 2019
Sharing Image ©2020 JR Korpa

In Late in the Day, Tessa Hadley writes that the main character Christine, whose friend has recently died, ‘understood how sex and death were both part of the mystery of entrances and exits, both opening onto this same strange place where they all belonged now’. The only way I can sum up Sharon Olds’ subject matter is that she tries to talk about almost everything that can be glimpsed from this ‘strange place’ everyone lives in. As her collections pile up over the years it begins to seem like she must remember every day of her life, as well as those of her parents and her children.

‘Where I Die’ opens with Olds watching or reading a ‘mystery’ when a dead man’s home being emptied out prompts her to see her own death. She imagines having designed her own life as an interlude when she was a ‘soul raptor, hovering in the / vestibule above existence’. At the poem’s close Olds develops this notion of agency, stating that she wants to have fun in death, ‘as if this whole thing were my / idea, a little comedy / between nothing and nothing’. The poem’s floating ‘raptor’ sees ‘the Pacific, and the Golden Gate, / and my parents’ roof’, as if each were intrinsic parts of a conception myth.

The notion of the speaker as formless observer allows for several moments where the walls fall away from concrete settings, revealing grander imagined landscapes. ‘Morning Aria, 6,000 Feet’ takes place in a dreamlike state where objects float into the frame and false impressions are formed. Here, the speaker transcends the domesticity of the hotel room setting by envisioning the ‘mountain’ source of the water before her:

The coffee filling the pot looks beautiful this morning,
made from mountain water,
then I realize I had forgotten to put any ground beans in,
and I start over. I am starting over.

In this case, though, the speaker comes up against hard reality; the flow of the extended sentence is stopped by a brief declarative.

Whether as small as this or as large as a birth, a death, or a break-up, Olds deals in moments of rupture. In ‘Where It Is Now’ Olds ponders as she sits on a train where, six years after divorce, ‘all that sex’ has gone. She searches for memories of it in the rushing landscape: it is not in ‘these wild grasses’ or ‘stored in tide pools’ / gardens’, but is, she decides, ‘nearby’. Olds is a rare writer who can provide satisfying conclusions to impossible problems: she decides that ‘the made love of a / life is the inner logic of a life, / the home fragrance’. Forgotten things are not gone but pressed under the weight of time, like sand into cliffs, forming landscapes we hardly notice. 

Her last collection was called Odes; this one suggests a series of pieces for a solo voice, though that doesn’t mean the perspective is singular. Arias opens with a series of poems addressing some of the darkest problems that haunt the American psyche: the president, police violence, the climate. The first poem is addressed to Trayvon Martin; others consider the atom bomb, her father’s whiteness, impending apocalypse. It’s almost as if Olds is purging all these topics – the kinds of things that can make it seem pointless, even insensitive, to be writing poetry – before diving into the rest of the collection. The crises that beset the world at large show up in the poems in small ways. In ‘Nevada City, California Aria’ the red light of a television’s power button is ‘the light which means: because we hate ourselves / we are igniting the earth’.

The arias are ordered alphabetically, an editorial construction with an appealing arbitrariness. This contrasts with the ordering of the three subsequent sections, in which poems dealing with the same events or ideas are loosely clustered together. The first set of elegies, all to her mother, is one of the most striking examples of this. Across successive poems – including one named ‘Where Is My Lady?’, and the next one ‘Where She Is Now’ – Olds revisits the same scenes, events, and thoughts. She associates her mother most vividly with the ocean, seeing her in various poems ‘inside / the sea, in pieces’, ‘pulled to the top / of many small waves’, and as ‘the sliding body of liquid / around me’. These pockets of sameness have surfaced in previous collections when Olds has looked back on giving birth, losing her virginity, or divorce. Her revisitations and rethinkings overlap over the course of this book, and over the course of multiple collections. As these clusters work gradually through traumatic or formative events, they seem less like repetitions and more like renewals. 

In ‘I Cannot Say I Did Not’ Olds delivers some of the broadest abstractions of the collection. Of life, she writes ‘nowhere in any / of it was there meaning’. She reflects on the reasons for her being born (‘beauty’, ‘money’, ‘desire’) and concludes: ‘I want to say that love / is the meaning, but I think that love may be / the means, what we ask with’. These broad musings on the uses and purposes of love recall the disjunctive questions of Alice Notley’s ‘This Fire’. Notley’s poem tries to locate and define an ‘it’ at the centre of living that would propel and justify everything: ‘This fire all there is . . . to find . . . I find it / You have to find it. It isn’t love, it’s what?’ 

Notley’s political verse and her writings on grief and family are an important contemporary correlate for Olds. Notley has been publishing poetry since the 70s; Olds since the 80s. But where Notley has veered increasingly into formal experiment, Olds’ poems over forty years have maintained the same format: a series of full sentences, lineated to stretch across ⅔ of the page, in one long stanza, usually an A5 page in length. Olds addresses this pattern in a wry, self-conscious moment: 

suddenly I see I do 
write poems in sentences – not broken into
lines, but wound around the caesura,
making a caduceus.

The line breaks, then, are not actually breaks, but functions of the poems’ shape. Being wound around the midpoint of the line, and forming a singular block of text, her long sentences don’t rely on silences or gaps to add gravity. 

In ‘Summer Night’, Louise Glück writes about her own poetry, and similarly explains its consistency over the years. Looking over her writing of lost love, unfulfilled desire, and missed opportunities – all ostensibly traditional, sentimental poetic subjects – she asks ‘Why should my poems not imitate my life?’ Glück makes a solid defence of the time-worn: ‘Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond— / surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects [...] I hear them echo in my heart, disguised as convention’. Olds’ poems also prove certain ‘inexhaustible subjects’ to be endlessly generative. Neither of these poets are uninventive or traditional, but the restraint they show in some areas makes space for insights of novelistic scope. 

The poems in Arias are most compelling when they are both deeply specific and deeply general. In ‘Tory Dent Elegy, Big Sur’ comes one of the most arresting moments of the collection:

[...] When I was a 
child they would ask us sinners what the
fuck we would say when brought before God
on the last day – and now I know, by the
green chainmail needle, by the thread
of sexual fire, by the gray lion’s spots; by the
boulder’s head and the foam’s silk, I would
say that I knew you, and then I would sit Him
down and feed Him, forever, Black Milk. 

Olds has built a poetic lexicon in which the human body is an element of the natural world, and monuments and relics from history feel as present as our own houses. The materials she cites here are intangible and resolutely textured: the words seem familiar but are ultimately strange. ‘Black Milk’ sounds like a mythical substance, but also like a godlike object of address, or a name being signed off. Olds’ great skill is to do two opposite things at once, to zoom out as she zooms in, so a ‘blue-green’ vein on her mother’s leg is ‘her own / Nile, privately        owned’. Blazing through an almost terrifying string of big questions, these poems offer paths through certain ends and uncertain futures. 

Julieta Caldas is a freelance writer based in London. Her poems appear in Tentacular and in the anthology Make Me Money & Don’t Piss Me Off (SPAM Press, 2020). 

Andrew Wells