Podcast
On Being with Krista Tippett
Published in 1984, this book contains poems about the public and private aspects of death and life. It includes poems about the Tulsa race riots, China, and other global events. It also contains poems about the author's children.
So in this book as well, because it's the dead and the living, and I think you pick up on something that also runs all the way through your work, which is the love that we have for our children and th...
— Episode: [Unedited] Sharon Olds with Krista Tippe...
Episode: [Unedited] Sharon Olds with Krista Tippett
Published in 1984, this book contains poems about the public and private aspects of death and life. It includes poems about the Tulsa race riots, China, and other global events. It also contains poems about the author's children.
So in this book as well, because it's the dead and the living, and I think you pick up on something that also runs all the way through your work, which is the love that we have for our children and the intimacy, that particular intimacy is there.
And when I look at The Dead and the Living, which I think was one of the books that made your name as a poet,
Exclusive for my daughter. I lie on the beach watching you as you lie on the beach, memorizing you against the time when you will not be with me.
Episode: Sharon Olds — Odes to the *****
This book explores themes of love for children and the intimacy of motherhood. It contains a poem about the speaker's memorization of her daughter's body.
So this book came out in 84. So the poem would have been written maybe two years before then. So maybe 10 years old, 12 years old.
Exclusive for my daughter. I lie on the beach watching you as you lie on the beach, memorizing you against the time when you will not be with me. Your empurpled lips swollen in the sun and smooth as the inner lips of a shell. Your biscuit gold skin glazed and faintly pitted like the surface of a biscuit. The serious knotted twine of your hair. I have loved you instead of anyone else, loved you as a way of loving no one else. Every separate grain of your body building the god as you were built within me, a sealed world. What if from your lips I had learned the love of other lips? From your starred gummed lashes, the love of other lashes. From your shut quivering eyes, the love of other eyes. From your body, the bodies. From your life, the lives. Today I see it is there to be learned from you to love what I do not own.
in this book as well, because it's the dead and the living, and I think you pick up on something that also runs all the way through your work, which is the love that we have for our children, and the intimacy, that particular intimacy is there.