The Father (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Almost too painful to read, Sharon Olds’s THE FATHER describes the death of her father from cancer, the events directly following, and her learning to live with his loss. The book’s power comes from its combination of the intensely physical with the mythic. The reader cannot escape these poems; from the first few lines, they are weighted with a Greek necessity. The minute details of hospital care and practical arrangements for cremation and funeral are woven into the universal tragedy of the loss of the loved one.

Both the mythic and the physical are evident in the titles: “His Smell,” “The Dead Body,” “Death,” “The Feelings,” “The Urn,” “The Underlife,” “The Ferryer.” The two primary participants, daughter and dying father, are caught in various postures which provide insight both into the father-daughter relationship and into this inevitable human scene. Other figures, the father’s wife and the poet’s daughter, for instance, appear, but basically this is a drama of two people. This kind of writing seems to work from the premise that accurate description of the particulars of pain brings transcendence, and so it does, to a certain extent, in the last few poems. But the release she achieves is not traditional or easy. In the last poem, “My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead,” the father accepts the daughter, all of her, body and mind, with “matter’s love”: “. . . when I say now that I love you/ I mean look down at your hand, move it,/ that action is matter’s love, for human/ love go elsewhere.”

Sources for Further Study

American Health. XI, July, 1992, p. 100.

Belles Lettres. VIII, Fall, 1992, p. 30.

Booklist. LXXXVIII, April 15, 1992, p. 1498.

Boston Globe. October 4, 1992, p. 37.

Library Journal. CXVII, April 15, 1992, p. 96.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. September 13, 1992, p. 15.

The Nation. CCLV, December 14, 1992, p. 748.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIX, April 6, 1992, p. 57.

Salmagundi. No. 97, Winter, 1993, p. 169.

Washington Times. July 19, 1992, p. B8.