Deep Water

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize

Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds’ stunningly poignant new sequence of poems, tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. In this wise and intimate telling – which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending – Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip.

Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable title poem, ‘When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver’.

Olds’ propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music – sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.

The Dark Film, Paul Farley’s first collection since the highly acclaimed Tramp in Flames, expands the poet’s research into ‘the art of seeing’, and all that humans project of themselves into the world. Farley’s great poetic gift is his ability to switch between the local and the universal, the present and the historical past, with the most apparently effortless of gear changes; he brings to our immediate attention things previously hidden – whether out of sight, in the periphery of our vision, or right under our noses. The Dark Film is a profound meditation on time, on the untold stories of our history, and on the act of human beholding – as well as Farley’s most richly entertaining and rewarding collection to date.