Sharon Olds is one of the foremost voices in contemporary poetry. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Stag’s Leap and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Strike Sparks, and author of numerous other collections, including Balladz (2022) and Odes, she is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally graphic poems marked by grace, chivalry, and precision. Born in 1942 in San Francisco, Olds grew up a “hellfire Calvinist” in Berkeley, California, attended Stanford University, and earned her PhD from Columbia University. She teaches in the graduate writing program at New York University.

Photograph by Hillery Stone.

Reading Sebald and Other Poems

by Sharon Olds

Reading Sebald

(for Chaim, 1944–2020)

Sometimes, when I am reading Sebald,
I wonder if this is what it would have been like
for you—if you had been able to see,
and think, feeling no pain, no grief, just
after you were buried. Music of a kind,
the percussive hit of New Hampshire dirt on the
wavy-edged lid of the homegrown home-kilned
pine of your coffin, made lovingly
as a bed for you. Then more quiet,
People on couch
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