Wellspring

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag's Leap, she is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the winner of many other awards and honours. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of Isidor Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.

"Sentences roll on with breathless urgency, and the emotional pace of these unstoppered utterances is remarkably effective... Visceral in detail and unsparingly honest in its psychology, the volume offers a tenderness and integrity which allow even the more shockingly erotic or confessional moments to say something about innocence" Guardian "Sharon Olds' poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the toughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss" -- Michael Ondaatje "Her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive. She sees description as a means to catharsis, and the result is impossible to forget...her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism and its power to move" -- David Leavitt "This, surely, is the sound the confessional hordes have been trying to utter since Lowell, the right road that is missed so easily" -- Glyn Maxwell