Still Life in Landscape

“Still Life in Landscape” appears inThe Unswept Room (2002), the ninth book by contemporary poet Sharon Olds. Starting with her first book, 1980’s Satan Says, Olds’s work critiques common assumptions about women’s subjective relation to the world, to family, and to themselves. Her poems can be described as free verse, but she also occasionally uses formal elements in sound arrangement and meter. “Still Life in Landscape” explores central themes of motherhood, family, and mortality; family relationships thematically dominate much of Olds’ work and underpin many of the poems in The Unswept Room. She also examines the latent menace in everyday life, especially the instances when violence bubbles to the surface, as it does in “Still Life in Landscape.” The 2004 volume of her selected poems, Strike Sparks, includes “Still Life in Landscape,” highlighting its importance within her overall body of work.

Poet Biography

Sharon Olds attributes her dislike of stanza form to childhood overexposure to lackluster hymnody. Born in San Francisco in 1942, her parents soon moved to Berkeley, where she was raised in a deeply Calvinist household. Her parents forbade television, movies, and certain kinds of music. Olds gravitated to rock and roll, atheism, and Allen Ginsberg while she was in high school, where she also began dancing as a means of artistic expression.

Olds studied at Stanford as an undergraduate, then went on to Columbia, where she earned her doctorate. In between, she married and had two children, defending her doctoral dissertation while pregnant with her second child. Her first book Satan Says came out in 1980; in 1984, her book The Dead and the Living earned her the National Book Critics Circle Award. From 2006 to 2012, she served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her 2012 collection Stag’s Leap won a Pulitzer Prize as well as the T. S. Eliot prize, the first book by a woman poet to be so honored.

From the unsteady world of an alcoholic father and complicit mother, to the joy of new love and marriage, through the terrors and rewards of parenting, Olds draws on her own personal experience to portray the universally human. Stag’s Leap, one of her most praised collections, chronicles the end of her almost 20-year marriage.

Olds divides literary critics. Her own generation saw her as disruptive and iconoclastic, but younger poets lament her consistency. Her visceral subject matter and blunt sexuality vex traditionalists, while experimental poets often dismiss her as too accessible and personal. Olds defines her own style, resisting confinement to a single genre or era. She continues to find popular success and a readership outside academic audiences.

Poem Text

Olds, Sharon. “Still Life in Landscape.” 2002. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The speaker of the poem recalls a night drive with her family in which they witness the aftermath of a car crash. She arranges the details in a narrative that contracts and expands—first to show clinical detail, then to focus on a wider context that includes the speaker herself and her own family’s violence. The victim’s body emerges in sharpest relief as the speaker renders its shape and condition as the central image of the poem. The scene transcends narrative, embodying the speaker’s fear of the familial violence close to her; she remembers a recent incident of her drunkenly driving father nearly hitting a pedestrian. The speaker’s family becomes complicit, part of the chaotic, indiscriminate violence. At once, the speaker sees the whole world contained in this experience, the stillness before and after violence. Like a still life painting, shapes and gestures echo between the collision’s debris and the speaker’s family, until the family itself is one more part of this tableau of mortality.