[The Dead and the Living] explores the bonds of love and terror that hold a family together. This beautifully structured collection, the Lamont poetry selection for 1983, moves from public to private, from poems for the dead to poems for the living. Always, Sharon Olds's voice is a private one, even in the "public" poems. She insists on making us see the intimate details of public atrocities: the "pale spider-belly head" of a newborn dead in Rhodesia, the face of a starving girl in Russia, the "blazing white shirts" of white men in Tulsa race riots. Her images in this first section of poems are as unflinching and immediate as news photographs.

Sharon Olds takes risks. This is clear as we move into her "private" poems for the dead and the living. "My bad grand-father wouldn't feed us," begins a poem called "The Eye." "He turned the lights out when we tried to read." The effect of this sort of revelation is not to titillate or to unload old grievances, though at times I was taken aback by the poet's boldness. Olds accumulates many details of her family history, some shocking, and with these she weaves new patterns, startling images of recognition. (pp. 497-98)

Sharon Olds's poems for her own children are among the best in this volume. Here her tenderness and her unshrinking eye for detail work together to create new ways of seeing children's growth and vibrant sexuality. Olds is wry, inventive, full of humor and love in these poems…. In "Exclusive," the poet watches her daughter at the beach, "memorizing" her "against the time when you will not be with me," and concludes: "To-day I see it is there to be learned from you: to love what I do not own."

I admire Sharon Olds's courage in The Dead and the Living. Out of private revelations she makes poems of universal truth, of sex, death, fear, love. Her poems are sometimes jarring, unexpected, bold, but always loving and deeply rewarding. (p. 498)