Sharon Olds Criticism
Sharon Olds is an acclaimed American poet whose work is celebrated for its raw and intensely personal exploration of domestic and political violence, sexuality, and familial relationships. Born in 1942 in San Francisco, Olds's education at Stanford and Columbia University laid the groundwork for a poetic career that delves deeply into the complexities of human emotions. Her debut collection, Satan Says (1980), introduces themes of family dynamics and personal turmoil, which she continues to develop in subsequent works. Rochelle Ratner critiques this debut for its emotional youthfulness, though it is praised by Sara Plath for its psychological depth and vivid imagery. Ratner and Mueller acknowledge Olds’s passionate voice, despite metaphorical lapses, while Joyce Peseroff highlights her vibrant metaphors for exploring survival and primal relationships.
Her second collection, The Dead and the Living (1984), juxtaposes personal narratives with reflections on political persecution and social injustice, a style reminiscent of Sylvia Plath as noted by Tillinghast. The collection earned the National Book Critics Circle Award and was commended by Elizabeth Gaffney for its intimate and courageous exploration of love, fear, and public atrocities. Harold Beaver underscores the transformative art Olds creates from her personal and broader human experiences. Publishers Weekly praised its exploration of life and death through both personal and historical lenses.
Olds's subsequent collections further solidify her reputation. The Gold Cell (1987) emphasizes the physicality central to her thematic concerns, with reviews by Libby and Yenser acknowledging its vivid imagery and narrative flow. Her 1992 collection, The Father, poignantly addresses her father's death from cancer, with Bedient recognizing the work's emotional intensity despite debates over self-indulgence.
Despite some criticism for over-dramatization and repetition, as seen in Davidson's essay, Olds's work continues to captivate with its narrative power and vivid metaphors. The Wellspring (1996) revisits her life stages with a focus on physicality, a theme celebrated in reviews like that of McDiarmid. Through her fearless exploration of personal and collective traumas, Olds remains a significant voice in contemporary poetry, offering universal insights through her singularly candid and emotionally charged lens.
Contents
- Principal Works
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Olds, Sharon (Vol. 32)
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Satan Says
(summary)
In the following essay, Rochelle Ratner critiques Sharon Olds's Satan Says as an emotionally youthful collection that transforms everyday experiences into deeper meanings, yet notes its reliance on shock value and initial stylistic missteps typical of a debut work.
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Satan Says
(summary)
In the following essay, Sara Plath examines how Sharon Olds' Satan Says deftly balances intense psychological themes and multi-layered imagery, with poems that, despite occasional bombast, often achieve a stunning blend of reality and nightmare.
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Three Poets
(summary)
In the following essay, Lisel Mueller critiques Sharon Olds's Satan Says for its passionate and autobiographical themes of pain and anger, praising the urgency and craftsmanship of her voice while noting occasional lapses in metaphorical coherence, particularly in the "Daughter" section.
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Joyce Peseroff
(summary)
In the following essay, Joyce Peseroff examines Sharon Olds' Satan Says, highlighting how Olds' vibrant metaphoric language captures themes of survival, primal relationships, and a dynamic universe that underscores both the dangers and heroism inherent in the experiences of women.
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The Dead and the Living
(summary)
The critic explores how Sharon Olds's The Dead and the Living examines universal themes of death and life through personal and public experiences, using direct language and vivid imagery to convey profound emotional depth across familial relationships.
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Snapshots and Artworks
(summary)
In the following essay, Harold Beaver argues that Sharon Olds's poetry in "The Dead and the Living" transforms personal family experiences into compelling art, juxtaposing intimate revelations with broader historical violence, ultimately revealing a nuanced interplay between human suffering and persistent comedy.
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Elizabeth Gaffney
(summary)
In the following essay, Elizabeth Gaffney praises Sharon Olds's collection "The Dead and the Living" for its courageous exploration of personal and universal themes such as love, sex, fear, and death, highlighting Olds's unflinching and intimate portrayal of both public atrocities and private family dynamics.
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Satan Says
(summary)
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Olds, Sharon (Vol. 85)
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Snapshots and Artworks
(summary)
In the following excerpt from a review of The Dead and the Living, he commends Olds on the intimacy and realism of her family portraits.
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The Dead and the Living
(summary)
In the following review of The Dead and the Living, she praises Olds's use of unadorned, concrete description to evoke sympathy and love in scenes of domestic violence and trauma.
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The Tune of Crisis
(summary)
In the following excerpt, she praises Old's use of intimate autobiographical details and vivid imagery in The Gold Cell.
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Fathers and Daughters and Mothers and Poets
(summary)
In the following excerpt, taken from a mixed review of The Gold Cell, he asserts that Olds's poems are hampered by a preoccupation with morbidity, physicality, and brutality.
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Soul Substance
(summary)
In the following mixed review of The Gold Cell, McEwen offers general praise for Olds's poetry, yet questions her fascination with voyeurism and her reliance on techniques employed in her previous books.
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The Gold Cell
(summary)
In the following excerpt, he offers a mixed assessment of Olds's The Gold Cell, admiring its powerful imagery and narrative flow, yet faulting its haphazard structure and sensationalistic themes.
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A review of The Gold Cell
(summary)
In the following excerpt, he examines stylistic and thematic aspects of The Gold Cell, noting that the volume exemplifies a candid narrative handling of painful subject matter.
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A review of The Gold Cell
(summary)
Wakoski remarks that Olds's poems exhibit a fascination with destruction, suffering, and bestiality. She compares reading The Gold Cell to the pleasures of reading National Geographic, noting its interesting content and the self-contained language of Olds that focuses on family and the broader theme of 'the family of man.'
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Four Salvers Salvaging: New Work by Voigt, Olds, Dove, and McHugh
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Harris describes the poems in The Gold Cell as "undeniably gripping," but questions whether the emotional intensity of Olds's verse is merely sensationalistic.
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The Matter of This World: New & Selected Poems
(summary)
Pybus praises Olds's focus on physicality, autobiography, and parent-child relationships in The Matter of This World, highlighting her strong selection from earlier works and the addition of new poems for her first British publication.
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Talking to Our Father. The Political and Mythical Appropriations of Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds
(summary)
In the following excerpt, she discusses Olds's use of metaphor as a means of articulating her painful and ambivalent feelings towards her father and as a strategy for healing and empowering the divided self of the poet/narrator.
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Knows Father Best
(summary)
In the following review of The Father, she examines the volume's autobiographical focus.
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Empty Beds, Empty Nests, Empty Cities
(summary)
In the following excerpt, she offers a mixed review of The Father, highlighting Sharon Olds' fearless and gritty celebration of a woman's physical nature.
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That Which Is Towards
(summary)
In the following excerpt, she offers a favorable assessment of The Father.
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Snapshots and Artworks
(summary)
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Olds, Sharon
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Seven Poets
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Murray discusses Olds's passionate treatment of such subjects as pain, love, and anger in Satan Says.
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Blunt Instruments
(summary)
Tillinghast is an American poet whose work exhibits his skill with varied poetic styles including, like Olds, confessional and political poetry. In the following excerpt in which he reviews The Dead and the Living, he compares Olds's poems to Sylvia Plath's and suggests that although Olds's work is flawed, its overall impact is powerful.
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Witness and Transformation
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Moyer discusses Olds's incorporation of personal pain and tragedy into her poetry, highlighting her role as a survivor who records and transforms her experiences.
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The Belabored Scene, The Subtlest Detail: How Craft Affects Heat in the Poetry of Sharon Olds and Sandra McPherson
(summary)
In the following excerpt, she argues that the poems in The Gold Cell are overdramatic and self-indulgent.
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The Body as Matter
(summary)
In the following review, Wills praises Olds's unsentimental and honest depiction of emotionally laden topics and social taboos in The Father. Some years ago, Sharon Olds's father died of throat cancer; this book comprises a sequence of poems charting the death of the body, and exploring the emotions and physical sensations experienced by the daughter in the face of the loss of an unloving father. With an easy lyricism, Olds recounts the gradual achievement of a kind of closeness, based not so much on mutual understanding as on an acceptance of the physical, of the body as matter.
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'Never Having Had You, I Cannot Let You Go': Sharon Olds's Poems of a Father-Daughter Relationship
(summary)
In the following essay, Dillon examines Olds's narrative about the relationship between her and her father running throughout Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, and The Gold Cell.
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Sentencing Eros
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Bedient provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of The Father, faulting Olds's self-indulgence but praising the force of some of the poems in the volume.
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The Forbidden
(summary)
In the following excerpt, she faults the poems in The Father for being repetitive.
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I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Bishop, Olds, and Stevens
(summary)
In the following excerpt from a comparative essay on Olds, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, she examines Olds's treatment of the theme of Eros, or erotic love. Ostriker concludes that although there are similarities between Bishop's and Olds's concepts of Eros, Bishop successfully addresses this theme and Olds does not.
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The Wellspring
(summary)
In the following review, Stenstrom favorably assesses The Wellspring. In this her fifth collection, awardwinning Olds surveys her life from conception to middle age with the laserlike attention to emotional and physical detail that is her hallmark. The book's first two sections focus on childhood and adolescence; the self-portrait Olds paints is of a voracious and egocentric child who thirsts for attention and is sensually attuned to all she experiences. Her recollections of her father's casual cruelties, though chilling, are dispassionately recounted. The second two sections are devoted to parenthood and conjugal love. Olds's poems about her children throb with love and pathos, and her paeans to an emotionally and physically satisfying marriage are among the book's most rewarding poems. In language that is taut, clear-sighted, and frank, Olds writes powerfully of life's most elemental experiences: birth, love, and death.
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Death-Watch: Terminal Illness and the Gaze in Sharon Olds's The Father
(summary)
In the following essay, she applies the concept of the gaze in film and literary theory to Olds's description of her terminally ill father in The Father.
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Private Parts: Sharon Olds's Poems Don't Shy Away from Physicality
(summary)
In the following review of The Wellspring, she discusses Olds's celebration of the body.
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Olds's 'Sex Without Love'
(summary)
In the following essay, Sutton analyzes thematic and stylistic contrasts in the poem "Sex Without Love." Sharon Olds's frequently anthologized poem gains power through three contrasts: a contrast between surface approval and deeper criticism of "the ones who make love / without love"; a contrast between emotional coldness and physical heat; and a contrast between the poem's solemn, philosophical tone and its reliance on sexually graphic puns.
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The Matter and Spirit of Death
(summary)
In the following essay, he discusses the therapeutic aspects of the poems in The Father, concluding that the volume "is a book in search of a catharsis and clarification of fear and pity."
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Seven Poets
(summary)
- Further Reading