The 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.
- ISBN10 0436339528
- ISBN13 9780436339523
- Publish Date 25 February 1993 (first published 21 April 1992)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 10 October 1996
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 88
- Language English