The best divorce poems ever written are often not about divorce, given that for the greater part of what we call western literary history, divorce wasn’t really much of an option. So there was death, there were affairs, and there was the occasional killing of one’s spouse. Most of the poetry that speaks to the emotions surrounding divorce involves the poetry of death, heartbreak, breakup, and loss. Modern prose has tackled divorce more robustly. Books about divorce range from the self-help variety to the memoir of survival, to the “divorce novel.” There are books that offer consolation and commiseration, but no genre of literature offers quite as much solace as poetry. Many have tackled the sorrows and challenges of divorce in prose; few have dared write about it in poetry. Sharon Olds, in Stag’s Leap, her stunning book of poetry about her divorce, does just that.
Tolstoy once wrote: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We could say something similar of divorce. Every marriage is alike; every divorce is unique in its own way. Sharon Olds’s book, Stag’s Leap transforms the raw grief of divorce into poetry. Language is a kind of alchemy and Olds’s poems are spells against grief. While Olds’s poetry might be called confessional, I like to think of these poems as more Romantic than anything else. As William Wordsworth once wrote: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Olds’s project is indeed this: the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and emotion recollected in tranquility. The wisdom of ideas and feelings long fermented permeate these poems. According to NPR, Olds waited 15 years to write about her divorce “half as long as her marriage lasted.” The poems are awful in the truest Romantic sense. They are full of awe at the long-lasting power of love and grief, and they are awful for the devastation they reflect in love’s loss.
The story that underlies Stag’s Leap is sad, but banal (isn’t that the sad fact of grief—how ordinary it is?): after 30 years of marriage, Olds’s husband leaves her for another woman. What Olds’s does with this experience is remarkable. She transformed the human heart into human art, and what emerges is a poetics of divorce that offers solace.
The poetry book opens with the shock of revelation. The first poem, “While He Told Me” follows through on its premise, offering readers a glimpse into the “formal feeling” that follows trauma. In the poem, Olds looks everywhere else but at the thing itself, the fact as it unfolds—the trauma of her marriage ending.
Marriage is a kind of identity-formation machine. The loss of this machinery can leave the lover with a loss of self. Olds later writes: “I feel an invisibility… What was it like, to love me—when you looked at me, what did you see?” Olds slips into beautifully simple and plain declarations, salted with unusual word choices. “I thought we were joined not just for breath’s time, but for the long continuance.”
There are moments where the poetry echoes Pablo Neruda’s “Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines).” She writes: “I did not know him, I did not work not to lose him, and I lost him.” This is devastating work.
Olds captures the upheaval that follows the division of two lives that had been once closely interwoven together. These are poems that capture the mystery of what it means to know and not know another human being. The work is imbued with the mystery of time, how it heals, how it divides: “After eleven million six hundred sixty-four thousand minutes of not, I am a stunned knower of not.” And: “I knew and did not know his brain, and its woody mountain casing, but the sheer familarness of his brow was like a kind of knowledge.” The beloved is at once known and a stranger, at once strange and familiar. “…from within my illusion of him I could not see him, or know him.” The sorrow of intimacy and familiarity is that it often blinds us to the wonder and marvel of the other. Olds writes, “We lived on it…without my seeing it, on the broken habit of what was not lasting love.” In a marriage, lovers can become blind to the marvel of the other, and they can also become blind to their own dysfunction. The dysfunction can become normalized over time.
But these are not just poems of sorrow; they are also poems of ecstasy. To be left is tragic, but also freeing. Olds writes: “When anyone escapes, my heart leaps up. Even when it is I who am escaped from.” Love is a state of mind above all else, and the record of how love continues even in the beloved’s absence is poignant and powerful. “I thought whatever we were, we were in lasting love.”
There are different kinds of knowledge at the end of a marriage. There is the knowledge of the marriage ending, usually known first by one person and then the other. There is the knowledge of the ending and the following through with that knowledge. And then there’s the unconscious knowledge. The knowledge of a division known but unspoken. “Tiny Siren” is a brilliant and haunting poem about the moment Olds knew and did not know her husband was cheating on her. She finds a photo of another woman in the Whirlpool (clever of Olds to link the ancient sirens to the modern contraption of a washing machine!). The husband admits that the other woman had given him the photo, and reassures his wife that he loves her. And then they make love. But Olds knows something, and that knowledge is a kind of wisdom any person who has been betrayed understands: “Just once, later in the day, I felt a touch seasick, as if a deck were tilting under me…”
Olds doesn’t say goodbye to her husband until the end of the book. Her husband, being the one who left her, had more time to come to terms with the leaving. Olds takes a good year before she says goodbye. When it comes, it is heartrending, but beautiful.
The wonder of poetry is that it can sometimes hit me with such truth and power, such wisdom, that it almost seems as if the poet’s words didn’t come from the poet, but came from within me, its reader. The poem has plumbed the depths of what it means to be human and has pulled up a glimmer of truth. The opening movement of “Approaching Godthab” did this for me, as did the poem, “The Shore”. The lines of “Approaching Godthab” go like this: “So much had become so connected to him that it seemed to belong to him, so that now, flying, for hours, above the Atlantic still felt like being over his realm.” I read those lines and thought about my own divorce, how so many experiences in my life had stopped being mine, and belonged to the “us” that had formed. When my grandmother passed away and I flew down from Canada to Miami for her funeral, I had stared down at the topography below, in awe that I could be looking upon it alone, unable to share it with my former partner. And it’s that alienation, the alienation of the familiar that comes at a breakup or the end of a relationship that Sharon Olds captures so well.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.