Reading Stag’s Leap is an uncomfortable sensation. At times, you feel like you are reading a stranger’s diary, section by section chronicling the breakdown of their marriage and aftermath of their divorce. Minutely observing the aftermath winter, spring, summer, fall… years later. Should you be reading it? This raw heartache?

At times, it’s more than that even. As you come to see slivers of yourself in the minutiae of the poet’s remembrances, there’s a gut punch as you recognise aspects of your own life and relationship and for a moment, despite the specificity, you forget that you are reading about Sharon Old’s heartbreak and begin to own it yourself. You are forced into something somewhere beyond empathy. The hidden chocolate bars of Discandied, the hidden tensions of Attempted Banquet create a hysteric feeling that something might be hiding in your own life, that a relationship so well-observed, so scrutinized by a seer poet, could hide a secret that drives two people apart after a life together.

Stag’s Leap is brilliant, of course, but oh so brave. To expose, surely, your utmost vulnerabilities – at times angry, at times disbelieving- to pin down your heartbreak so clinically, like a butterfly collector, and display those emotions and thoughts for all the world to marvel at.

The whole collection is a must read, but the poems that called out to me were Tiny Siren, for the cinematic melodrama of the moment described; To Our Miscarried One Age 30 Now, for the obvious overidentification that poem provoked; and finally The Healers. There’s a line at the end of The Healers that suggests that the poet’s husband had been uncomfortable with her career, “he did not feel happy when words/ were called for, and I stood”. It would be wrong to judge a relationship or a person based on a sequence of poems, but it did make me wonder what Sharon Old’s ex-husband must have thought of becoming the inspiration and subject of a T.S. Eliot Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poetry given the implication of The Healers.