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Metropolitan City Blue Springs ... Arts Monday, Mar 24, 2003
Books
Posted on Sun, Jan. 05, 2003 Poet Sharon Olds trods same ground
By SUZANNE RHODENBAUGH
Special to The Star
An unswept room may be unswept because of human absence, neglect or choice. There's an unseemliness about the possibility involving choice, for it suggests a too self-conscious display of life's evidence. In her seventh poetry book's title poem, "The Unswept Room," Sharon Olds calls this evidence "some fancies of crumbs/ from under love's table." In this collection, Olds not only returns to the same subjects of earlier books (body, sexuality, parents, children) but also to the same stances or themes: having had the worst parents on the planet and, without cease, what is apparently the best sex life on earth. Her credibility on these subjects and themes may come down to the reader's prrvious experience with her writing. Someone new to reading her may stand in awe at her boldness, openness and undiminished capacity for brilliant metaphor-making. A reader coming back to her work may feel it is time for this sexagenarian poet to forgive her parents, or at least leave off the accusatory posture, and be a little less ostentatious about the bedroom wonders. There is a measure of forgiveness of her mother here, in "7 a.m.," "The Music" and the amazing poem "Acadia, Late," where she transforms the skin tags and growths of aging into signs of return to pre-life: "...the lady's/ face is sprouting twigs, she is/ a dryad who goes back, she is approaching matter/ to pass through its shimmer again, its fissured/ bark, and return." | |
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