Blood, Tin, Straw

October 4, 1999
This sixth collection from Olds (Satan Says) revisits the obsessive roles and disturbing bodily images that have become her trademarks: she presents herself once again as lover, mother, daughter and voyeur. Olds certainly has a flair for diction, whether describing the aftermath of protected sex ("gore condom in the toilet a moment/ like a sea pet in its bowl, the eel/ taking our unconceived out to the open ocean") or the act of childbirth: "in the crush/ between the babies' skull-plates and the skin/ of the birth-gates, I wanted the symphesis/ more cherished." Anecdotes meant to shock abound. One poem records oral fixations: "I want to suck/ sweet, hot milk, with the salt/ silk of the human woman along/ my cheek." Another outlines death wishes: "I wanted to be/ fucked blind, battered half dead with it." One at a time, these scenes can be arresting; one after another, they make parts of the book as tiresomely, disappointingly repetitive as a sex therapist's case notes. Olds's arrangement of her work into five sections of fourteen poems each (the three title elements, plus "Fire" and "Light") does nothing to counter the book's overall sameness. Though she anticipates charges of narcissism with the poem "Take the I Out," Olds's descriptions of other victims can seem tactless, even predatory-a girl burned by napalm flings her "arms/ out to the sides, like a plucked heron"; the ill-fated crew of the space shuttle Challenger becomes a "burning jigsaw puzzle of flesh." Olds still suceeds, though, when she attends to her own body, where her skills continue to make her, as she writes, "a message conveyor,/ a flesh Morse."

December 1, 1999
Olds enjoys the reputation of a phenomenon; her collections of poetry (from Satan Says onward) remain in print, discussed, and passed from hand to hand throughout the United States. Her sixth book is without doubt her strongest to date. Olds's trademark has long been her astonishing candor--about her body, her husband's body, her parents' bodies, sex before and during her marriage, fear, dread, death, and hope--and this quality is still firmly in place here, but she has added to it a new strength and lyricism of metaphor and image. In "The Lips," for instance, she playfully deploys Neoplatonic metaphysics in this paean to her husband's love: "...did he love me before/ he knew me, before I was born? Maybe/ his love drew me to earth, my head/ moved to the surface of my mother's body, and.../ I came toward him in her ribbons, through her favors." She has turned her gaze to the unearthly with touching results: "Without desire or rage/ I would watch that dust celestium as the pain/ on my matter died and turned to spirit/ and wandered the cloud world of home,/ the ashes of the earth." Olds may be relied upon to startle--she uses many words that cannot be reprinted here--but the shock she delivers is that of true poetry. For all poetry collections.--Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA

Copyright 1999 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 1999
If the body is the temple of the soul, then Olds is the priestess, and her poems are psalms in praise of sex, holy matrimony, and motherhood. Olds has always been a daring poet of the flesh, but now in her fifth book, a major work, she embraces the entire universe from its microscopic swirlings--tail-lashing sperm, the dividing of cells in a fertilized egg--to such cosmic spectacles as a blazing star or the volcanic shudders of the earth. Everything is eroticized. She sees galaxies in a sprinkling of sand on skin, the curve of a planet in the arc of an eye, and the whole of creation in the act of coitus. Lovers become so intimate, they inhabit each other's bodies, and Olds writes more forthrightly about women's sexuality--the hunger, blood, tensility, and heat of it--than any of her sister poets. This collection is poetry as memoir, mined from the very core of her being, and washed clean in the salt of the sea and of sweat, made sweet with mother's milk and honey, and blessed by the light that shines on each page from the entranced and grateful eyes of her readers. ((Reviewed October 1, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)