[Schweizer is an educator and critic. 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."]

Sharon Olds' poetic sequence The Father records her father's death from cancer. Each breath, cough, spit of mucus, and stool is accounted for. The book is obsessed with waiting, with breathing, with bodily functions of the most intimate and ultimate kind, as if the poet wanted to wrest a secret from the slow process of dying, being present to her father's dying so as not to miss the split second when the secret might leap out of the body. The book lingers, at times with an astonishing patience and insistence, particularly over the exact moment of his death, which is the title of one poem. Olds releases her father slowly and with costly tenderness, letting go only after he has begged for it in the manner of Jacob. The book is a work in slow motion, an anticipatory and retrospective grieving, a pity and fear, all in ritual passage reminiscent of the monastic schedule, with the poems bearing such titles as "The Waiting," "The Pulling," "The Lumens," "His Stillness," "The Want," "The Lifting," and so forth.

Above all, the book is about matter. Olds seems to learn with relief that that is all it is: "I have always longed to believe in what I am seeing." The father's death, where it might have most strongly called this longing into question, most strongly reconfirms it. Indeed, it seems as if the> suffering and death of the father was a last occasion to prove that truth must be in the particular, in the body, not in the soul, in history, not beyond it.

The line ending on "his body rises …" may offer a momentary illusion or allusion to the body rising from the dead, but it is the law of matter that seeks its destiny, breath not spirit, matter not metaphor. Father and daughter lie not in heaven but "somewhere on the outskirts / of the garden of Eden…."

I wish I could say I saw a long
shapely leg pull free from the chrysalis, a
wet wing, a creature unfold and
fly out through the window, but he died down
into his body….

The spiritual does become—perhaps necessarily if matter wants to be truth—the narrative's dialectical opponent; it has to be called forth to be called off. How else could one say that the body is enough, other than that the poet, having known her father "soulless" all her childhood, would have descended and looked for his soul if he could have been helped? But since these possibilities are denied, even salvation will be absorbed by matter. Will matter shine with its own salvation? Will salvation matter?

The book begins and ends with matter, frames its argument with matter and with all of its declensions and conjugations, as noun and verb, material and moral truth. The opening reference to Genesis where the father is "night / watchman of matter, sitting facing / the water—the earth without form, and void, / darkness upon the face of it, as if / waiting for his daughter"—makes a grand, perhaps intentionally too grand, announcement of a romantic creative rivalry between God and daughter, spirit and matter. The daughter is not always creator of her own world and language and, being subject to the father-God's breath, she is also subject to the father's uncreative powers: "I was an Eve / he took and pressed back into clay…." That the daughter survives is only due to the stronger power of death. Death is the daughter's liberator.

In retrospect one realizes that even the very first line of the book—"No matter how early I would get up …" announces, allusively, the matter of this book. But while this is a book about matter its purpose is thoroughly redemptive: it is to redeem the clay into which he had pressed her. The body of her dying father is the site of redemption. The last page closes with the father's voice from the dead, "I am matter, / your father …" framing, thematizing this book in between whose covers there is the body of the father, still or restless, first sitting, then lying, then sinking down, in pain and in sleep, all minutely observed. There is a veritable poetics, a creative theory, in the father's relentless decline deeper into body and ash and earth and the daughter's rising, not higher, but also deeper into her conviction that soul is nothing, matter all, and yet that death can do what life undid. The bitter memories of what life undid, or what the father did, accelerate their appearance in the second part of the book. The book therefore, one senses, is a last chance of healing and helping what could never be healed or helped in life.

Each poem is a measurement of minute increments of time, of inexorable, irreparable progress, granting only the smallest reprieves and returns to previous scenes and settings. There is only one seeming remission when the father "is better, he is dying a little more slowly"; otherwise the narrative of this sequence is obedient to the strict authority of time and disease and death. Many of the poems begin by marking time, "How early …" "The last morning …" "Every hour …" "Now …" "… and there are three weeks left." "I waited …," and so forth. In the middle of the book, the book of waiting contracts to briefer increments of time. The diary of dying which had been a living with time, becomes now a living on the verge of timelessness. The question of whether one can continue where death ends looms somewhere in that intense narrow margin of time/lessness marked by the imminence of death. Then, after ten or so pages of return and repetition of death and reflection on the moment of death itself, time expands by leaps "Beyond Harm," "One Year" into the future where even memory is torn down ("The Motel") and the father's death not only recedes, but also rises up again in myth and dream.

The certainty of death is the book's telos from which it derives its assurance of arrival and survival as well as its style. The breath of the author is dependent first on the breath then on the death of the father, the matter of his breath and death is finally reflected by a style marked by lucid, factual clarity. Caring for the father is equally therapeutic for the daughter. Mutuality is one of the book's themes and is frequently encountered in the father's breathing, where the dauther discovers her dependency, the source of her own breathing and writing. Nor is there a question about authorship or reference or autobiography. The unproblematic analogy between life and art suggests instead that the death need not be, cannot be, transformed through art, and that art, likewise, seeks no transformative powers beyond being simply the power of witness and attendance, a being-there as factual as a back rub, although as much a labor of love. It is only in the latter part of the book, in what one might call the "memorypoems," where the desire for the indifference of matter leaves the remainder of an "unearned desire" and the incompletions of love.

The narrative contingency and continuance depends on seeing the father safely through to the fire, a resistance to the pull of death and a liberation from death. But eventually the achievement of the book, when the telos of the father's death has been consummated, is to continue continuance itself. The book therefore eventually asks the question: what writing can survive a death? How does one write after the most consummating narrative event? How does one write after one has written to the end? Perhaps that is why the sequence lingers at that latter point, returning to and rewriting and repeating the death until it releases the writer into freedom: "I suddenly thought, with amazement, he will always / love me now, and I laughed—he was dead, dead!"

Many of the issues I have mentioned here in summary are addressed in a poem entitled "I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died." The title seems more idealistic than the qualification that follows immediately: "… because I wanted to see him die—." Indeed, The Father is a book almost exclusively of seeing. "I have always longed to believe in what I was seeing." It is a curious admission since it implies other beliefs, which are, presumably, tested out at the site of the father's dying and found wanting. It is here in "I Wanted to Be There …" that we learn one of the secret motivations of the poet's presence at her father's deathbed, a motivation that explains partially the distance implied in "seeing":

because I wanted to see him die—
and not just to know him, down to
the ground, the dirt of his unmaking, and not
just to give him a last chance
to give me something, or take his loathing
back.

The dimensions of the daughter's relationship with the father and her childhood are present in other poems as well where we learn that if the daughter now has "nothing for him, no net, / no heaven to catch him," it is because he taught his daughter "only / the earth, night, sleep, the male / body in its beauty and fearsomeness." But besides fear she returns to him also pity. "The Look" gives one of the most moving examples. The last lines of the poem read:

In the balance of pity and fear, these remain cherished moments, encounters of which there is not much likeness, to my knowledge, in modern American poetry. The Father is a book in search of a catharsis and clarification of fear and pity, that they may be offered in right measure and balance. If Sharon Olds' book wants to be such an offering, the catharsis that the narrative ought to work out for its author remains one of the book's major labors, born in poem after poem, throughout the long summer of the father's dying. "All summer he had gagged, as if trying / to cough his whole esophagus out." We read on in "I Wanted to Be There …":

surely his pain and depression had appeased me,
and yet I wanted to see him die
not just to see no soul come
free of his body, no mucal genie of
spirit jump
forth from his mouth,
proving the body on earth is all we have got,
I wanted to watch my father die
because I hated him. Oh, I loved him,
my hands cherished him….

The Father is an articulation, a verbal extension of the "Oh," held precariously between the two forces of love and hatred, fear and pity. But eventually even the hands that cherished him will delegate their task to "other hands" into which it might be better to "commend this spirit," for not all issues between love and hatred have been, can be, resolved in poetry.

The hands that cherished him cherished the body, meaning the particular, the historical, Aristotle's "that which was." It is no body if it can be generalized, just as one cannot generalize caring, washing, nursing, helping, witnessing. Hence, the particularity of the descriptions and accounts of mucus, spit, and stool. Even the language of the poems follows the law of material truth: it avoids poeticizing this particular death, lest it might turn into Aristotle's poetic universals and thereby into a belying of individual suffering and dying. Thus, each poem, redescending into the labor of moments and situations, also refuses to let suffering, death, and caring become transformed into art.

What we admire in this volume is firstly not the art of writing but the art of nursing. What we admire must be first the exemplary moral determination and love of the daughter to nurse her father—she who "had stopped / longing for him to address [her] from his heart." Her father, we learn progressively, at times would not speak for a week, had never asked his daughter for anything, had never really looked at her, had regularly passed out on the couch in alcoholic stupor, and had only when he sickened turned to his wife and daughter. In spite of this grim record of her youth, there is not an instant of hesitation as the book begins—significantly "early"—in the daughter's moral determination. To the father she must have appeared like a Cordelia, proving in the numerous instances of closeness and intimacy a loyalty and affection rare and difficult.

He gargled, I got the cup ready,
I didn't vary the stroke, he spat, I
praised him, I let the full pleasure
of caressing my father come awake in my body,
and then I could touch him from deep in my heart….

Such attention, merging as it does pain with pleasure and matter with spirit, reconnects the world in its deepest fundamentality. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is in this poem that we find one of the epiphanies of the book, when the father momentarily responds with his "dark shining confiding eyes." If the world needs an ethical foundation, its beginnings would be in such small, intimate, and brief mergings of pleasure and pain. "This is the world where sex lives, the world / of the nerves, the world without church, / … outside the world of the moral" as Olds points out in "Death and Morality." The book is the record of the strategies of the will, of the small, small acts of attention, measured by the paced continuance of the sequence, by which this merging of pleasure and pain could be possible and consciously attended to. The originality of Olds' book is in the particularity of the death and deed, in which service she left behind, as Kierkegaard would say, both the category of ethics and of aesthetics. The Father tells of the incomprehensible category beyond. Olds' denial of spiritual revelation, her insistance on the body demands that the church find itself in hospitals rather than "far away, in a field," where one can hear "the distant hymns of a tentmeeting…."