“I Go Back to May 1937” is included in Olds’s collection The Gold Cell. Reception of Olds’s poems is often mixed, including reception for The Gold Cell. While individual poems from a collection are rarely singled out for comment in a review of the book, Terri Brown-Davidson does comment specifically on “I Go Back to May 1937” in a review of The Gold Cell for the Hollins Critic. Brown-Davidson refers to the first dozen lines of the poem as “disturbing,” not because of the poem’s intensity or topic, but because the critic finds the poem “formulaic.” Brown-Davidson sug- gests that Olds is not taking chances with her poetry, and is instead refusing “to push beyond the boundaries to grow and keep growing.” The critic argues that Olds’s poetry is “belabored” and “overdramatic,” and that “I Go Back to May 1937” is “fossilized.” Brown-Davidson’s primary criticism focuses on what the critic perceives as the sameness of Olds’s work. According to Brown-Davidson, Olds has not grown as poet and has not been willing to try new approaches to her poetry.

However, one critic finds much to praise about The Gold Cell. Peter Harris, writing for the Virginia Quarterly Review, states, “Olds treats both the present and the past with a make-you-squirm explicitness that’s buffered only by an ingenuous honesty about her relationship to the events she describes.” These are poems that Harris labels as “confessional” and “gripping.” Harris also cites Olds as having the “voice of a peculiarly exuberant survivor who speaks with gusto.” In responding to criticism that Olds’s poems have a sameness to them, Harris argues that this sameness “should not obscure the fact that she writes with great flair and often shows a resonant dramatic intelligence in searching out the contexts, or the frameworks of implication.” Harris also cites Olds’s “fertile metaphoric imagination” and her “analogical imagination” as strengths that provide insight into her poems. Harris concludes by stating, “The Gold Cell is saner and more full of love than anyone could reasonably expect.”

A slightly more mixed reaction is offered by Christian McEwen, writing for the Nation. In a review of The Gold Cell, McEwen states that the political poems contained in the beginning of Olds’s collection are “thrilling with imaginative sympathy.” McEwen suggests that while other poets have attempted this style of poetry, none have managed to convey the images so well. McEwen also singles out the family poems in this book, which display the author’s “fierce rhetorical skill.” Although McEwen acknowledges that Olds’s poems are not without fault, his critique singles out only a few individual poems as lacking the overall strength of the other poems. In spite of some small concerns, McEwen’s endorsement of Olds’s work is very favorable.