Sharon Olds’s newest book of poems Balladz (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), is the third in a series of books where the poet takes on a specific poetic form. In 2016, she published Odes, and in 2019, she published Arias, and it’s recommended that readers read both books to get a sense of what the poet has been up to for the last several years. Balladz is of the same level of creative brilliance as its two counterparts; the book is split into multiple sections: Quarantine, Amherst Balladz, Balladz, Albums from a Previous Existence, and Elegies. In this book, Olds explores many of the same topics readers of her work will be familiar with: womanhood, her relationship with her mother, female sexuality, and her observational insights. In this collection, Olds also talks about the death of her partner, Carl, and quarantine during COVID as she experienced it. Olds’s female-centered poetic voice is as strong and refreshing as ever in this collection, and her ability to keep familiar subject matter new and interesting is a testament to her creative talents as an experienced poet. In addition to that, her sense of playfulness comes through even more vividly through the ballad form, which she makes interesting and compelling again. This review will highlight a few key poems in Balladz that embody the pronounced strengths of Olds’s poetry.

In the first section of the book (Quarantine), Olds writes about how she experienced the pandemic. The poems in this section very much inhabit solitude and isolation, but also a sense of honesty. In the poem, “Centipede,” the speaker recounts how she discovered the large insect above her head while she was waking up, and kills it. Here’s the first part of the poem:

Woken sober supine—at the top of the wall,
along the edge of the ceiling—
the blurred, oval dark of a roof-leak
or a creature. Put on glasses, pick up
binoculars—
a jointed insect, 6 inches long,
8 inches with the fringe of its legs
oval around it,
antennae the length of its body again
at the front.

Olds has always been a very descriptive poet, and here, she paints a strong scene of waking up and finding the centipede sitting just above her head. After this description, she makes a very candid statement: “If I could have spared it, if I could have / caught and released—.” After that, she talks about how she went about killing the insect, by grabbing a “junior broom” and missing its body at first. Here is a description of the insect’s death:

[it] slid down
the wall onto my bureau—it rippled,
silky and swirling, over embroider—and the
centispear of straws stabbed down,
scattering crystal and jet, and then the
acrobat swivel dancer crawled
forward away from its back two dozen
legs, and turned over slowly, in its fine
tassels.

This experience of killing an insect during the pandemic feels significant, not just because it’s one of many experiences Olds includes in her book, but because there is a slight political implication that emerges after the speaker articulates an especially brutal truth: “Of course I am a killer, I am / human.” This is an important line in the poem because it roots the speaker’s experience of killing an insect in the moment of extreme political brutality that existed at the height of COVID—the huge death toll of humans due to a virus that was leaked from a lab that the US government and the medical industry could not (or would not) treat properly. As vulnerable as many people were in that moment, Olds points to an insect as being just as vulnerable, not because of a virus, but because of the speaker’s instinct to kill it. She continues: “There had been two lives / in the apartment, now there is one.” In the process of killing the centipede, the speaker did not view it has having a life; it was something that needed to be destroyed. The possible underlying truth that is not explicitly stated in the poem is that the centipede mirrored the speaker’s fear of being vulnerable while she was experiencing helplessness and isolation during a very politicized pandemic. What makes this poem even more compelling is how Olds chooses to close it out with a strong romantic image: “Outside / The window and down, the flame poplar / sways south and north, mourning for the earth.” She gives space to another life—the tree outside the window, which seems to be intuitively feeling the pain of the moment and “mourning for the earth.” What feels like a poem that might merely be about killing an insect is much more than that; it becomes an experience that metaphorically represents Olds’s understanding of her own brutality in an especially brutal moment—the COVID pandemic.

A principal strength of the collection is how Olds explores the ballad form. Readers who are familiar with her previous success with odes and arias will be just as impressed with her ability to work with and improve the ballad form. In “Ballad of the Chair” Olds revisits her experience of being tied to a chair as a child, but the poem is very retrospective. Many of Olds’s poems have a retrospective quality to them, but in this poem, there seems to be an element of retrospective emotional honesty that shines through that is possibly influenced by the ballad form. She begins by talking about the word “chair”:

When I stare at the word, and it begins to loosen
and come apart, I see it has
hair in it, and air in it, and
ai and I.

Olds’s playfulness is often so compelling because it’s very nuanced and specific to the poet’s sense of imagination and wonder, even if the situation itself is utterly brutal (like reflecting on childhood abuse). The speaker describes the chair—“It had no head, no arms, it had / a back and four legs, which could not walk….it was made of dead material which had been / living, once, still marked with the free / swim of its grain…”—and begins to reflect more specifically on the role the chair played in her traumatic experience:

…And my relationship
with it was something new in my life,
I’d never been held down, and bound
to a thing, made equal with it. All I could have

had to do was say “I’m sorry
I poured the India ink on your bed.”
We didn’t have the word no-brainer, which has
ruin in it, and bra…

Olds continues that thread of playfulness, but here, it feels like the playfulness is meant to soften the situation and its brutal truth: she remained tied to the chair because of her refusal to apologize. Here are the final stanzas:

…O.K., it warped me, it scared me, it
obsessed me—well what can you do. Some kids

have a hobby-horse, some a thing
which has been tied to them.
Maybe it’s time to put my prop
to sleep, to bury it, its shape

of someone who died in a fire, and plant
a bush above it, whose rose-roots can find it as it
rots, and lets my chair leaf out
again, green bud and blossom.

The ending is especially poignant because of the honesty Olds employs. She admits that the experience left a deep, life-long impression on her: “it warped me, it scared me, it / obsessed me.” But then, she says “Maybe it’s time to put my prop / to sleep.” This suggests that Olds sees the chair as an object that is to be used in a physical sense—in a theatrical or cinematic production. And it is her prop—it is specific to her. The influence of the ballad form might also be at play here, as its four-line stanzas create compression which challenge the speaker to get to the core of what they feel. The poem ends with an emotive image: the chair being compared to “someone who died in a fire” and rotting under a plant “whose rose-roots can find it as it / rots, and lets my chair leaf out / again, green bud and blossom.” In this sense, the act of burying the chair, and letting it decay, gives it a chance to transform into a new, fertile life-form, as if it has been reincarnated so it could flourish in ways it wasn’t able to in its previous life as an object of abuse.

“If I Had Been Able” starts off the fourth section of Olds’s Book, and it is about her relationship with her mother and female sexuality. It begins: “If I had been able, as an embryo, / to put my whole face into one of my / mother’s pansies, I would have.” Here, Olds’s is setting the poem up to be magical and floral and feminine. She also brings in how she experienced female sexuality: “Although I was not / allowed to touch myself, maybe I / knew girls had a part—that part which, / even untouched, sang—descended / from a blossom.” She recognizes that she did not need to touch herself to feel sexual pleasure: “When I get my friend’s note, / the bloom at the center of my body tingles / and swells, it sparkles and slightly opens.” However, the poem shifts immediately after that, right back to her mother, and then shifts back to how she views her sexual nature:

I’m a flower as my mother was a flower, and I was made
inside her, and grew on the stem we made
together, and left through her gates which opened
below my head.  I love my cunt,
and want to honor its name, the coney
in it, the rabbit in it, the cover,
the burrow…

“If I Had Been Able” feels very much like a meditative poem on female sexuality. Although Olds is not often regarded as a meditative poet (she’s primarily seen as a confessional poet), the poems in this collection seem to point more toward the meditative aspects of Olds’s work that are often overshadowed by the confessional poet label. The way this poem meanders and shifts and maintains its steady consciousness on feminine sexuality and the relationship between a mother and a daughter is suggestive of a meditative quality. The poem ends with the speaker proclaiming, “…because it [the speaker’s vagina] came / from inside my mother, and came through its own / mother, I want to honor my mother’s / body, her lady country.” The poem ends with devotion and praise—which also feels spiritual, another concept that Olds is rarely associated with. The poem is also notable for being feminist in the way it highlights the female body as being the primary place where life takes root and develops.

For readers of Sharon Olds’s work, Balladz will not disappoint. The book is compelling and interesting and excellent all the way through. Olds’s poetry is still fresh and relevant, and still has much in it to influence younger poets through her strong female-centered voice, her playfulness, and her emphasis on personal experience and creativity as still being the main energies that contribute to poetic empowerment.

October 9, 2023