**From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a
powerful collection from one of our most gifted and widely read
poets--117 of her finest poems drawn from her seven published volumes.
**
Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds's poetry "pure fire in the
hands" and cheered the "roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and
completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of
passion and loss." This rich selection exhibits those qualities in poem
after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with
rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the
personal. Subjects are revisited--the pain of childhood, adolescent
sexual stirrings, the fulfillment of marriage, the wonder of
children--but each recasting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by
new perceptions and conceits.
Strike Sparks is a testament to this remarkable poet's continuing and
amazing growth.