About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group

ISBN-100679740023

ISBN-139780679740025

eBay Product ID (ePID)880077

Product Key Features

Book TitleFather : Poems

Number of Pages96 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year1992

TopicGeneral, Subjects & Themes / Family, American / General, Poetry

GenreLiterary Criticism, Poetry

AuthorSharon Olds

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.3 in

Item Weight3.6 Oz

Item Length8.3 in

Item Width5.8 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

Dewey Edition20

TitleLeadingThe

Dewey Decimal811.54

SynopsisThe Father is a sequence of poems, a daughter's vision of a father's illness and death. It chronicles these events in a connected narrative, from the onset of the illness to reflections in the years after the death. The book is, most of all, a series of acts of understanding. The poems are impelled by a passion to know, and a freedom to follow wherever the truth may lead. The book goes into area of feeling and experience rarely entered in poetry. The ebullient language, the startling, far-reaching images, the sense of extraordinary connectedness seize us immediately. Sharon Olds transforms a harsh reality with truthfulness, with beauty, with humor--and without bitterness. The deep pain in The Father arises from a death, and from understanding a life. But there is joy as well. In the end, we discover we have been reading not a grim accounting but an inspiriting tragedy, transcending the personal. The radiance and daring that have always distinguished Sharon Old's work find here their most powerful expression., A searing sequence of poems about a daughter's vision of a father's illness and death--by the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called "a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won't back down" ( San Francisco Chronicle ). The Father chronicles these events in a connected narrative, from the onset of the illness to reflections in the years after the death. The book is, most of all, a series of acts of understanding. The poems are impelled by a passion to know, and a freedom to follow wherever the truth may lead. The book goes into area of feeling and experience rarely entered in poetry. The ebullient language, the startling, far-reaching images, the sense of extraordinary connectedness seize us immediately. Sharon Olds transforms a harsh reality with truthfulness, with beauty, with humor--and without bitterness. The deep pain in The Father arises from a death, and from understanding a life. But there is joy as well. In the end, we discover we have been reading not a grim accounting but an inspiriting tragedy, transcending the personal. The radiance and daring that have always distinguished Sharon Old's work find here their most powerful expression.