One secret thing

HARDBACK. Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humor, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energysometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and dangerpublic and privateilluminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning.One Secret Thingis charged throughout with Sharon Oldss characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.