Summary

In “Sea-Level Elegy,” the speaker recalls the coastal property that she rented each summer with her ex-husband, which she still allows herself to revisit annually. The speaker frames this revisitation as a descent, both physical and figurative. Beginning with “the stairs down into the earth,” she maps the interior spaces of the home, guided by the memories of events that occurred there. As noted above, elegy refers to a poem of mourning.

“Sleekit Cowrin’” alludes to the Robert Burns poem “To a Mouse, on Turning Up in Her Nest With the Plough,” in which the poet accidentally destroys a mouse’s nest while tending the fields. Olds’ poem depicts the speaker setting mouse traps on her “wedding china / floral salad plates,” and catching a mouse in one of them. She places the rodent’s body out on the porch with the intention of...