# One Secret Thing

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/sharon-olds/one-secret-thing/9780224087841

![One Secret Thing](https://quivercdn.com/covers/jonathan-cape/sharon-olds/one-secret-thing_978-02-2408-784-1.jpg?v=2026-04-24%2010%3A02%3A57)

- Book: [One Secret Thing](https://www.bookquiver.com/sharon-olds/one-secret-thing) ([One Secret Thing.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/sharon-olds/one-secret-thing.md))
- Authors: [Sharon Olds](https://www.bookquiver.com/sharon-olds)
- Publisher: jonathan_cape
- ISBN: 978-02-2408-784-1
- Pages: 96
- Published: 2009-03-05
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humour, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy - sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger - public and private - illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revision, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds's characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.