The father

Description

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 seem to lead. The book goes into areas 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 Olds' work find here their most powerful expression.

First Sentence

No matter how early I would get up and come out of the guest room, and look down the hall, there between the wings of the wing-back chair my father would be sitting, his head calm and dark between the wings.

Subjects

Other Editions

• The fatherKnopf1992-01-01
• The fatherKnopf1993-01-01
• The FatherSecker & Warburg1993-02-25
• The fatherKnopf1996-01-01