For her 2012 collection of poetry, Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds received the TS Eliot prize for the best new poetry book in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The award includes a check for £15,000. The chair of the final judging panel was Carol Ann Duffy, UK’s Poet Laureate. In Duffy’s citation for Olds, she said, “This was the book of her career. There is a grace and chivalry in her grief that marks her out as being a world-class poet.” The Guardian described Stag’s Leap as a “series of poems that describe the sharp grief of divorce and the slow, painful, incremental creep of recovery.”

Sharon Olds, a past recipient of awards including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships and the National Book Critics Circle Award, is known for being an acutely self-aware poet who does not shy away from intimations of the body and intense or private emotional states. In her biography at the Poetry Foundation website, her work is described as being “built out of intimate details concerning her children, her fraught relationship with her parents and, most controversially, her sex life,” which has led venerated critic Helen Vendler to disparage her and former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins to praise her.

The short-list of ten poets up for the award included Jorie Graham, Gillian Clarke, Simon Armitage, Paul Farley, Julia Copus, Deryn Rees-Jones, Kathleen Jamie, Jacob Polley, and Sean Borrodale.

“I always say that poetry is the music of being human, and in this book she is really singing,” said Duffy. “[Olds’] journey from grief to healing is beautifully executed.”

Links: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sharon-olds , http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/14/sharon-olds-ts-eliot-poetry-prize