Blood, Tin, Straw

The words of Olds' poems in this book encompass such daring, personal subjects that I was left stunned. Who else but Sharon Olds could make a beautiful poem about watching menstrual blood flow into the toilet by comparing it to ballet dancers? Who else would push the enevelope of public disgust enough to compare vaginal secretion and diamonds? She speaks and glorifies the unmentionable and ugly. In this way, she truly remakes the female body as she writes of it. The experience of reading Olds is not just intellectual; it is a visceral enlightenment.

This book of poetry is unique both in style and content. I am reminded of a statement made by Sharon Olds in a reading of hers that I attended where she was talked about her surprise when another poet revealed to her that the events in one of his poems never occurred. When he turned it around and asked if everything she wrote about came from personal experience, she response was, "Well, of course, always." However, it isn't simply the fact that she writes from her life's experience, because that can be said of many of the poets writing today. It is the honesty and the revelation wrought from her experiences that make her work like a four dimensional object, where one is not expecting the angle that one gets as the object turns. There is also another kind of surprise that occurs in almost every poem. It is an undercurrent of violence, violence intimated, violence implied, violence thought, and violence that has occurred. And yet, the violence in Olds' work does not quite meet our expectations, which have been shaped and pounded by a deluge of film, news and docudrama. Olds doesn't seem to want to shock us, because she makes us believe that there is only one sensible conclusion. She accomplishes this by the depth and originality of each argument. There is such a purity of revelation behind each statement that the reader finds himself spellbound by the rationale, and privileged to find himself a new member of her sublime revolution.

Oh, I already hear the complaint: Sharon is still writing about the same subjects!--as if subject can suddenly be exhausted or moved away from! But there is motion in this book--evidenced by its pieced together title: The poet is doing something deliberate and strange by approaching aspects of her poems through both internal and external foci. What makes Sharon Olds worth reading--whether its a finished poem or her grocery list--is this: she does not seek to recreate her own experience for the reader but rather describe her own personal moment of revelation in the trust that the revelation itself is transcendent--that is to say, perhaps, she trusts the experience more than her capacity to share it--in this she is a mystic, a profoundly religious poet, not in the tradition of confessional poets or American poets, but in the tradition of St. Theresa, of Rumi, of Lalla...

Once again, Olds' word-crafting pulls at soul and spirit with a delicate, deliberate flow through perception and emotion.