Balladz

A commanding poet revered and disparaged for her intrepid explicitness regarding the body, Olds follows Odes (2016) and Arias (2019) with another collection named for a lyric form. This substantial gathering is funny, furious, discomfiting, ravishing, mythic, and sorrowful. In the opening section, "Quarantine," the poet has left New York for "the house in the woods," where she battles with marauding insects and mice and faces up to just how privileged she is as the pandemic and racist police violence surge. As always, Olds describes herself and her loved ones in startlingly microscopic detail, finding beauty in the ravages of age and even death. Visceral and confessional, Olds dissects the minutiae of the everyday and revisits the theme central to her work, tormenting memories of her mother, though now with a new awareness of her "unearned luck." The adroit series, "Amherst Balladz," pays clever tribute to Emily Dickinson, while "Elegies" is a set of opulent poems that counter loss with exquisite immersions in nature's intricacy. Passionately precise, Olds unites the primordial with the scientific, the mundane with the chthonic, flesh with spirit.

Ranging from quarantine to issues of whiteness, the Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot Prize--winning Olds continues her laserlike attentiveness to the life around her life as she crisscrosses childhood, young adulthood, and contemporary times, sometimes in the style of Emily Dickinson.