[McDiarmid is an American educator and editor. In the following review of The Wellspring, she discusses Olds's celebration of the body.]

If the body electric that Whitman sang were set in one of Eavan Boland's domestic interiors, and addressed with the affectionate wisdom of Donald Hall, it might become the kind of body Sharon Olds celebrates in The Wellspring—sensual, familiar, beloved. These new poems, her fifth collection, describe the poet's "apprenticeship to the mortal" from her prenatal memories through adult sexuality, from "My First Weeks" through "Celibacy at Twenty" to "True Love."

The bodies she writes about—her mother's, father's, lovers', children's, husband's—exist with all their genetic histories and reproductive organs fully visible to the poet. To visit her mother's college is to remember a time when "Half of me / was deep in her body, dyed egg / with my name on it"; to consider the zipper of her son's outgrown jeans is to remember that he "had waited inside me so many years, his / egg in my side before I was born, / and he sprang fresh in his father that morning." In "The Source" Ms. Olds imagines her father's testicles ("My brothers / and sisters are there, swimming by the cinerous / millions"), as, in "Eggs" (from an earlier volume, The Dead and the Living), she had imagined her daughter's ovaries.

Perhaps it's her California background that enables Ms. Olds to write without any apparent cultural memory of Puritan taboos. The double body of her parents engaged in intercourse has long been a composite muse for her poetry. In "My Father Speaks to Me From the Dead," the final poem of The Father, her cremated father speaks to her with a new wisdom "where I have been / I understand this life, I am matter, / your father, I made you." In "The Wellspring" Ms. Olds at first visualizes with disdain her mother's temperature chart, "the little x on the / rising line."

But when a friend was pouring wine
and said that I seem to have been a child who had been wanted,
I took the wine against my lips
as if my mouth were moving along
that valved wall in my mother's body, she was
bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then
bearing down, pressing me out into
the world that was not enough for her without me in it.

Because Ms. Olds cannot imagine her parents loving each other, she rewrites her conception to attribute to each parent, singly, a desire for her birth. These genetic and obstetric intimacies must stand in for the missing nuclear family.

The family invoked in the dedication of The Wellspring ("For our daughter and son") and in many of its poems may have made possible the poet's revisionist reading of her own childhood. The wellspring of the title is human love envisioned as a fluid source of life. Thus it is no accident that the idea of herself as a child her mother wanted occurs "when a friend was pouring wine," or that (in "The Source") she thinks of herself during intercourse as "the glass of sourmash / my father lifted to his mouth." The bliss of being breast-fed meant that "every four / hours I could have the world in my mouth."

It is not easy to sustain without sentimentality a vision that could turn into a paean to family values. The Wellspring sustains it for many reasons, among them the chanting rhythms of the line that make each poem a miniature somatic ritual. And like Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression. To Whitman, the slave at auction was "the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns, / In him the start of populous states and rich republics." In poems from The Dead and the Living Ms. Olds made a lament of that trope, mourning the starving Russian girl in a 1921 photograph by imagining that "Deep in her body / the ovaries let out her first eggs," and seeing in the penis of a murdered Armenian boy "the source / of the children he would have had."

In the new poem "May 1968," a revisiting of the famous student protest at Columbia, Ms. Olds's own body lying on the street becomes a site of resistance:

As "May 1968" moves from the confrontational politics of the campus to the ultrasonic vision of the protester's womb, the occasional poem turns into a lullaby. It is a sign of the complexity of Sharon Olds's vision that the pregnant body, all that domestic future of cribs and birthday parties latent within it, can still be the body militant.