Stag's Leap
by Sharon Olds
Summary
Stag's Leap is the book Sharon Olds wrote when her husband of thirty years left her for another woman, and it may be the most complete anatomy of a divorce in poetry: forty nine poems that follow the marriage's last year and the first years after, through shock, bargaining, rage, carnal grief for a body known by heart and gone, and the slow strange arrival of release. Olds had spent her career writing the intimate life, the body, sex, children, parents, with a candor that made her famous and controversial, and here the method meets its ultimate material; what startled reviewers most was the generosity, the poems' insistence on seeing the leaving husband whole, even tenderly, the title taken from the label of the wine they drank, the stag in mid leap becoming the emblem of the man springing free. She waited to publish. Olds had promised her children she would hold the poems until at least a decade had passed, and the collection appeared roughly fifteen years after the marriage ended, grief revised by time into something with the poise of tragedy and the detail, as one reviewer put it, of fury. The awards were unanimous in both senses: the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize, given by a unanimous panel whose chair, Carol Ann Duffy, called it a tremendous book of grace and gallantry that crowned the career of a world class poet, and then the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. No American woman had won the Eliot before. It has become the book the newly divorced are handed, which is its own kind of laurel.
Historical Context & Significance
Olds had been the most widely read serious American poet for two decades while the prize establishment kept its distance, her frankness dismissed as confession by critics the public ignored, and the 2012 Eliot and 2013 Pulitzer double settled the argument in her favor at seventy. The delayed publication became part of the book's meaning, proof that the poems were made things rather than dispatches, grief given the years it needed to become form. Stag's Leap now anchors the modern literature of divorce alongside the great bereavement memoirs, and its influence runs through the autobiographical candor of the generations publishing since, who cite Olds as the permission giver, the poet who proved the private life could carry a whole career's weight without apology.