 | |
| Author | Sharon Olds |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Knopf |
Publication date | October 4, 2022 |
| Pages | 192 |
| ISBN | 978-1524711610 |
| Preceded by | Arias |
Balladz is a 2022 poetry collection by Sharon Olds, published by Knopf. [1] The book was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize. [2] [3] It was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. [4]
The book is divided into five sections: "Quarantine", "Amherst Balladz", "Balladz", "Album from a Previous Existence", and "Elegies". Its poems feature themes such as love, family, and the COVID-19 pandemic, among others. The "Elegies" section, bearing two parts, addresses the deaths of those whom Olds knew.
In a starred review, Library Journal wrote "Ranging from family to mortality to social justice, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Olds (Stag’s Leap) continues her laserlike attentiveness to the life around her life as she crisscrosses childhood, young adulthood, and contemporary times, particularly quarantine." [5]
Some critics observed the vitality of Olds' poetry notwithstanding how long she has written poetry for. The Guardian called the poems "a delicate reckoning" and said that Olds, after "a long writing career," still "proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping." [6] Similarly, Sage Cigarettes said "These are poems in the style and theme that Olds has pioneered and perfected for a lifetime." [7] Dundee University Review of the Arts stated "This book was published in her 80th year and serves as proof that she is still a vital and productive voice. Balladz is also as accessible and engaging as ever." [8]
The Times Literary Supplement called the book "such a profound disappointment" due to its repetition of imagery ("Her mother’s unsettlingly turquoise eyes and requests for back-rubs are both brought up twice in separate poems") and its uninteresting derivation of Emily Dickinson in some parts, among other reasons. [9]
Anne Patricia Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor.
The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin.
Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction. Michaels was the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 2016 to 2019, and she is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces, which was adapted for the screen in 2007.
Jane Draycott FRSL is a British poet, artistic collaborator and poetry translator. She was born in London in 1954 and studied at King's College London and the University of Bristol. Draycott's fifth collection The Kingdom was published in 2023 by Carcanet Press.
Pascale Petit, is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. She was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She has travelled widely, particularly in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon and India.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
George Szirtes is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. Szirtes was a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) for "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Kevin Young is an American poet and the director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture since 2021. Author of 11 books and editor of eight others, Young previously served as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. A winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a finalist for the National Book Award for his 2003 collection Jelly Roll: A Blues, Young was Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and curator of Emory's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. In March 2017, Young was named poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. From 1 October 2019 until 30 September 2023, she was the Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Michael Symmons Roberts FRSL is a British poet.
Phil Hall is a Canadian poet.
Fiona Ruth Sampson, Born 1963 is a British poet, writer, editor, translator and academic who was the first woman editor of Poetry Review since Muriel Spark. She received a MBE for services to literature in 2017.
Caroline Bird is a British poet, playwright, and author.
Brenda Shaughnessy is an Asian American poet most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda and So Much Synth. Her book, Our Andromeda, was named a Library Journal "Book of the Year," one of The New York Times's "100 Best Books of 2013." Additionally, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly named So Much Synth as one of the best poetry collections of 2016. Shaughnessy works as an Associate Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing program at Rutgers University–Newark.
Kaie Kellough is a Canadian poet and novelist. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, raised in Calgary, Alberta, and in 1998 moved to Montreal, Quebec, where he lives.
Ian Williams is a Canadian poet and fiction writer. His collection of short stories, Not Anyone's Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and his debut novel, Reproduction, was awarded the 2019 Giller Prize. His work has been shortlisted for various awards, as well.
Natalie Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Mojave American poet, language activist, former professional basketball player, and educator. She is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community and identifies as Akimel O'odham. She is currently an Associate Professor at Arizona State University.
Eleanor Goodman is an American poet, writer, and translator of Chinese. Her 2014 translation of the poems of Wang Xiaoni, Something Crosses My Mind was an international finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and a winner of the Lucien Stryk American Literary Translators Association Prize for excellence in translation.
Canisia Lubrin is a writer, critic, professor, poet and editor. Originally from St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, Canada.