Sharon Olds has established herself as a major American poet whose themes of sexuality and power as daughter, wife, and mother are of particular importance to women. Besides depicting family life, she...
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In the following excerpt, Murray discusses Olds's passionate treatment of such subjects as pain, love, and anger in Satan Says.
If there were a physics of suffering, some way to graph the pain ...
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In the following excerpt, Bedient provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of The Father, faulting Olds's self-indulgence but praising the force of some of the poems in the volume.
Sharon Old...
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Glück is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, she faults the poems in The Father for being repetitive.
Sharon Olds is a poet of considerable achievement and a whole...
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Ostriker is an American poet, critic, editor, and educator. In the following excerpt from a comparative essay on Olds, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, she examines Olds's treatment of th...
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In the following review, Stenstrom favorably assesses The Wellspring.
In this her fifth collection [The Wellspring], awardwinning Olds surveys her life from conception to middle age with the laserlike...
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Tanner is the author of Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction. In the following essay, she applies the concept of the gaze in film and literary theory to Olds'...
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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 ...
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In the following essay, Sutton analyzes thematic and stylistic contrasts in the poem "Sex Without Love."
Sharon Olds's frequently anthologized poem "Sex Without Love"...
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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 ...
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Tillinghast is an American poet whose work exhibits his skill with varied poetic styles including, like Olds, confessional and political poetry. In the following excerpt in which he reviews The Dead a...
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Wright is an American poet whose work has won numerous awards. In the following review of The Dead and the Living, she praises Olds's use of unadorned, concrete description to evoke sympathy an...
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Wakoski is an American poet, essayist, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt from a review of The Gold Cell, she remarks that Olds's poems exhibit a fascination with destruction, suffe...
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In the following excerpt, Moyer discusses Olds's incorporation of personal pain and tragedy into her poetry.
"We crave getting into each other's pain," Sharon Olds said in ...
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Brown-Davidson is an American writer and educator. In the following excerpt, she argues that the poems in The Gold Cell are overdramatic and self-indulgent.
I am a poet of excess, Definition, "...
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In the following review, Wills praises Olds's unsentimental and honest depiction of emotionally laden topics and social taboos in The Father.
Some years ago, Sharon Olds's father died of...
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In the following essay, Dillon examines Olds's narrative about the relationship between her and her father running throughout Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, and The Gold Cell.
In her firs...
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Critical Essay by Rochelle Ratner
[Satan Says is] an emotionally young book; hate and love of parents, woman suddenly out on her own, the frightened wife and mother. Olds's experience can easil...
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Critical Essay by Sara Plath
Sharon Olds' poems [in Satan Says] are perpetually balanced at the edge of hyperbolic violence—a balance maintained between the deep psychological sources of...
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Critical Essay by Lisel Mueller
Sharon Olds's first book [Satan Says], which is uncompromisingly autobiographical, is divided into sections titled for the roles in which she experiences herself...
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Critical Essay by Joyce Peseroff
Sharon Olds survives the battling of an alcoholic father and a mother who "… took us and / hid us so he could not get at us / … so there were no m...
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Critical Essay by Publishers Weekly
The deeply felt cycle of poems [in The Dead and the Living] concerns the universal experiences of death, both public and private, and life…. From executions ...
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Critical Essay by Harold Beaver
"The Dead and the Living" is a family album prefaced by snapshots of the century's agonies—images of executions, race riots and gory death f...
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Critical Essay by Elizabeth Gaffney
[The Dead and the Living] explores the bonds of love and terror that hold a family together. This beautifully structured collection, the Lamont poetry selection for...
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In the following excerpt, Harris describes the poems in The Gold Cell as "undeniably gripping," but questions whether the emotional intensity of Olds's verse is merely sensational...
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Pybus is an English editor, educator, and poet. In the excerpt below, he praises Olds's focus on physicality, autobiography, and parent-child relationships in The Matter of This World.
The Amer...
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Matson is a poet and educator. In the following excerpt, she discusses Olds's use of metaphor as a means of articulating her painful and ambivalent feelings towards her father and as a strategy...
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Lesser is an American poet, translator, critic, and educator. In the following review of The Father, she examines the volume's autobiographical focus.
Through four volumes of poetry—Sata...
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Zeidner is an American novelist, poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, she offers a mixed review of The Father.
William Butler Yeats declared that "only two topics can be of the...
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Keelan is an editor and poet. In the following excerpt, she offers a favorable assessment of The Father.
Though I have attempted to discard much of the dogma of my childhood Catholicism, I have never ...
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Beaver is a German-born English critic, novelist, educator, and editor. In the following excerpt from a review of The Dead and the Living, he commends Olds on the intimacy and realism of her family po...
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Wright is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following review of The Dead and the Living, she praises Olds's use of unadorned, concrete description to evoke sympathy and love in sce...
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Ostriker is an American poet, critic, editor, and educator. In the following excerpt, she praises Old's use of intimate autobiographical details and vivid imagery in The Gold Cell.
The opening ...
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Libby is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, taken from a mixed review of The Gold Cell, he asserts that Olds's poems are hampered by a preoccupation with morbidity, phys...
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In the following mixed review of The Gold Cell, McEwen offers general praise for Olds's poetry, yet questions her fascination with voyeurism and her reliance on techniques employed in her previ...
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Hudgins is an American poet, short story writer, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, he offers a mixed assessment of Olds's The Gold Cell, admiring its powerful imagery and narrativ...
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Yenser is an American critic, educator, and poet. In the following excerpt, he examines stylistic and thematic aspects of The Gold Cell, noting that the volume exemplifies a candid narrative handling ...
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Wakoski is an American poet, essayist, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, she remarks that Olds's poems exhibit a fascination with destruction, suffering, and bestiality.
Reading T...
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Long ago sex without love was a kind of prostitution, now it became almost an everyday thing (particularly during spring break!), nothing strange about it. Sex without love is simply doing the same th...
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Sharon Olds
