The Dead and the Living was my first exposure to Sharon Olds, who won the 1984 National Book Critics' Circle Award for Poetry for this collection, which was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. The Lamont Prize is given for a poet’s second full-length book.
The Dead and the Living displays great emotional depth and maturity as Olds explores the world of familial relationships. The structure of the collection provides a fluidity of progression from poem to poem, subject to subject. One reads through Olds’ poetry as though compelled to turn each page. But be sure you pause to reflect on these poems and their stunning use of language.
Olds knows how to turn a phrase for just the right effect. She takes great pains to set down only the most perfect word. There are no throwaway lines here. Her poems are tight and powerful.
The first section of the collection is the Poems for the Dead, split into “Public” and “Private.” Public contains poems that are more like eulogies for well-known people, or for people she sees in photographs in the newspaper. Many of these poems are politically charged, as in “Nevsky Prospekt (July 1917)”:
The wide grey stone square
is dotted with fallen inky shapes
and dropped white hats. Everything else is
heaving away like a sea from the noise we
feel in the silence of the photograph
the way deaf see sound: the terrible
voice of the submachine guns saying
This is more important than your life.
The second –- and far larger -- section of the book is the Poems for the Living, which is split into “The Family,” “The Men,” and “The Children.” There is a great deal of pain in these poems, a universal pain that transcends race or class. Everyone is somebody’s child and these poems put an exacting finger on the pulse of dysfunctional familial ties without resorting to the cliché. For example, in “The Elder Sister”:
… I look at her wrinkles, her clenched
jaws, her frown-lines – I see they are
the dents on my shield, the blows that did not reach me.
She protected me, not as a mother
protects a child, with love, but as a
hostage protects the one who makes her
escape as I made my escape, with my sister’s
body held in front of me.
Poems in the section for The Men focus on husbands and lovers. These are sensuous, inviting poems about attraction and sex, love and melancholy. Olds’ poems for The Children depict the aching love of a mother for her child. The majority of the poems in this section capture the wonder of Olds as she witnesses the growth of these miracles to which she gave birth. From “35/10”:
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