Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds

The title alone was enough to intrigue me, those three words, in combination, so elemental, so earthbound and fragrant.  I think of words written with a piece of straw dipped in an open wound and scratched out across some rusted corregated roofing beside a broken down barn.  This collection was a lot different from, One Secret Thing, which I reviewed a few weeks ago.  The poems are totally unreserved, instinctual and lusty.  Just my kind of stuff.  I may have even turned a few non-poets on to Olds’ work the other night with my whiskey tinged reading of , “When it Comes” a poem about the magic, the microscopic “pocket planet” that lives within the “gel / sac of a galaxy, / the black-violet, lobed pool, calm / as a lake on the back side of the moon”.   Gleaming bodies, soliloquizing fetuses and animal music.  Poetry that reminds you, you are alive.  More to come.   Get it for yourself:  Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds