The Waiting -- Nullipara -- The Pulling -- The Glass -- Death and Morality -- The Picture I Want -- The Lumens -- His Terror -- His Stillness -- The Want -- The Lifting -- The Look -- The Struggle -- The Present Moment -- Last Acts -- The Transformed One -- Last Words -- Close to Death -- Wonder -- The Race -- The Request -- Psalm -- My Father's Eyes -- The Last Day -- The Exact Moment of His Death -- His Smell -- The Dead Body -- Death -- The Feelings -- After Death -- What Shocked Me When My Father Died -- Death and Murder -- The Mortal One -- The Urn -- His Ashes -- Beyond Harm -- The Underlife -- One Year -- The Swimmer -- The Exam -- Natural History -- The Cigars -- Parent Visiting Day -- Letter to My Father from 40,000 Feet -- The Pull -- The Ferryer -- The Motel -- I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died -- When the Dead Ask My Father about Me -- To My Father -- Waste Sonata -- My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead.

The Father is a sequence of poems, a daughter's vision of a father's illness and death. It chronicles these events in a connected narrative, from the onset of the illness to reflections in the years after the death. The book is, most of all, a series of acts of understanding. The poems are impelled by a passion to know and a freedom to follow wherever the truth may seem to lead. The book goes into areas of feeling and experience rarely entered in poetry. The ebullient language, the startling, far-reaching images, the sense of extraordinary connectedness seize us immediately. Sharon Olds transforms a harsh reality with truthfulness, with beauty, with humor--and without bitterness.

The deep pain in The Father arises from a death, and from understanding a life. But there is joy as well. In the end, we discover we have been reading not a grim accounting but an inspiriting tragedy, transcending the personal. The radiance and daring that have always distinguished Sharon Olds' work find here their most powerful expression.

Also issued online.