Safe Landing For ‘Stag’s Leap’?

What do you do when, after 30 years, your husband tells you he is leaving you for someone else? If you’re poet Sharon Olds, you grab your spiral-bound notebook and write about it. And though the marriage ended in 1997, she has waited 15 years to tell us about it — half as long as her marriage lasted.

What do you do when the life you’ve believed in suddenly unravels? Divorce is surreal, and this book’s portraits capture the upending feeling of lives growing separate. Tracing first the 12 months and then the year after the parting — Olds’ poems depict things as intimate as sex during the last weeks before being left, the final moment of really looking into her former beloved’s eyes, and the moment when, even as the World Trade Center towers come down in the city they now separately share, Olds finds herself wishing her former husband well.

Olds is known for being a poet of the personal. She has spent her 32-year career documenting family, sometimes in crushingly close detail. But here, loss is also slowed by the desire to chronicle it. In furious detail, the poems in Stag’s Leap craft stations of grief and then move through them. At moments the grief itself is refined into a macabre, courtly dance: