Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and ha
rmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of i
rony. The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a
prelude to poems of home in which humour, anger, and compassion sing together w
ith lyric energy - sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking f
orgiveness. These songs of joy and danger - public and private - illuminate one
another.
