If you want to know what it’s like for Sharon Olds to menstruate, or squeeze her oil-filled pores, or discover her naked father shitting, Blood, Tin, Straw[1] will tell you. If you want to know what her sex life is like (it’s wonderful, trust her!), she’ll tell you, and tell you in prurient, anatomical detail the Greek philosophers would have killed for—she’s the empirical queen of lovemaking, of every secret session of the body.
If I could change one physical thing
about myself, I would retract those tiny
twilit lips which appeared at the mouth
of my body when the children’s heads pressedout, I would
haul back up into heaven those little
ladder-tatters, although in the crush
between the babies’ skull-plates and the skin
of the birth-gates, I wanted the symphysis
more cherished—and he seems to like thosebruised
celestial wattles, their clasp, their tip-of-
seraph-pinion purple. They are
the last licks that the other world took,
crown to sole, along each darling,
he kisses a god’s small tongues in them
and they soul-kiss him back.
Aristotle would have loved her metaphors, her anatomy lessons (and how he would have delighted in symphysis). I should have stopped quoting after half-a-dozen lines; but part of the hypnotic fascination of Olds’s poetry is its headlong, hell-for-leather hubris—you never know what’s coming next, but you’re sure it’s going to be a disaster. She may start a poem complaining about