In her new collection of poetry, "Blood, Tin, Straw," Sharon Olds revisits the temple of the body at which she has worshipped so skillfully in the past.
Born in 1942, Olds has entered middle age with a renewed focus on determining identity through the experiences of love, lust and family. If one were to regard each of her collections as a family of poetry, this one would have mixed bloodlines, highs and lows, and the occasional black sheep. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be invited to the next family reunion; it is simply a warning to the reader unfamiliar with her work.
Traditionally, the hallmark of Olds' poetry has been the confidence and surety of her voice. With this confidence comes an almost threatening frankness. When the speaker, who seems undifferentiated from the author, makes "The Promise" with her husband to kill him if he falls ill, and vice versa, she extends the commitment: "if a lion / had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes / binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them." This fervency is both moving and disturbing; Olds often makes the suggestion that the fierce energy of love cannot be contained within a relationship, but instead permeates the whole of existence.
Olds' speakers are so preoccupied with sexuality that they insist on examining their parents in such terms. In "Once," the speaker sees her father naked, and "In an instant, my gaze ran / in a single, swerving, unimpeded / swoop, up: toe, ankle, / knee, hip, rib, nape, shoulder, elbow, wrist, knuckle ... bulge of the hip-joint, border of the pelvic cradle." A different speaker eroticizes the flowers in "My Mother's Pansies" as "those plush entries, / night mouth, pillow mouth, / anyone might want to push / their pinky, or anything, into such velveteen / chambers, such throats, each midnight-velvet / petal saying touch-touch-touch, please touch-touch, please-touch." Olds shines by openly discussing what the average gun-shy, Freudian-versed poet might run from.
In a departure from the topic of sexuality, Olds seems excited to explore the efforts of her youngest son to be the self-appointed "Electricity Saviour" of the household. He runs around, turning off all the lights, forcing the family to "live in a partial dusk, / banging our shins, and every time / we bring the old chandelier up / to half blaze, a wiry arm / bends around the doorframe." This, while a witty and amusing poem, fails to mine the drama of Olds' family as she has done in the past. The relative time of peace in the poet's contemplative life comes at a price to the reader.
The stinging cycles of her 1987 collection "The Gold Cell" - the death of her father, her first love, her first sexual experience - are missing here. Instead, she revisits the "Animal Music" of intercourse from the perspective of the second time around, "when the parted walls / of the Red Sea closed, again, with their shining / clasping closings." While Olds remains skilled in the phrasing, the essential pulse of the work has slowed somewhat; we are, indeed, retracing the motions.
After collection upon collection of treatises about the body, Olds undertakes a curious reduction of vocabulary this time around; it's difficult to decipher whether this is an effort to simplify and familiarize her voice, or a function of an exhausted creativity. Like Elizabeth Bishop, Olds has never been afraid to question the authority of the author and speaker. In "You Kindly," she evades further elucidation of a subject by insisting "then / more, that cannot be told - may be, / but cannot be, things that did not / have to do with me." Sometimes, an even more basic evasion is the use of the most crass terminology possible. In "19," a speaker recalls early sexual initiation: "his fingertip / barely missing my - whatever, in love, one would / call the ass-."
This precipitous dip in the sophistication level of the tone is both liberating and frustrating. Olds seems to revel in the repeated use of a particularly crude word for female genitalia. On one hand, it seems pretentious to insist on the use of a polysyllabic word when a single syllable will do; on the other hand, Olds comes across as lazy rather than earthy.
At one point in the collection, there is a run of poems featuring toilet imagery. In "Bacchanal in Memory," Olds envisions a "Gore condom in the toilet a moment / like a sea pet in its bowl, the eel / taking our unconceived out to the open ocean." The only benefit of reading this particular set of poems is the confirmation that "condom" has officially joined the small collection of words, also including "e-mail," that cannot be aestheticized - even through poetry. Throughout her career, Olds has broached boundaries of intimacy, but perhaps at this point she is crossing borders best left guarded.
These criticisms become most relevant when Olds broaches a less incendiary, but more inventive image, and we witness her skill in attacking and reattacking it. Within the course of a single poem, "The Necklace," she characterizes a string of pearls as, alternately, "small whipper or snapper, milk or garter," "a stripped spine" and "oyster braille." The strongest poems in this collection use touchstones that can function outside the intensely interior world of sexuality: alphabet soup, fifth grade fights, "gesso" underpants "painted" on a beaten body as they were on the figure of Jesus.
These images are refreshing not because they are safe, but because they are new. A shining example of this is "Coming of Age, 1966." Here Olds interweaves the familiar territory of the time "When [she] came in sex in full, not sex / in fits and starts, but day and night" with the tangible details of daily life - learning Latin in a month, feeling "cheated by Lyndon Johnson," living through a period when the predominant urges were to "make love, and sometimes / march, my heart aching with righteousness."
Simple economics plague the world of contemporary poetry; there are far more poets who want to publish their works than there are those willing to buy them. In the spirit of supporting this struggling artisan community, it would be wonderful to recommend "Blood, Tin, Straw" unconditionally. But readers who want to find a collection to keep by the bed and read over and over again would best avoid this collection and purchase "The Gold Cell" instead. These poems, some tired the first time around, are mostly exhausted by the third or fourth. "Blood, Tin, Straw" is a book to borrow from the library and try to return with a minimum of coffee stains.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
