SOURCE: "Sentencing Eros," in Salmagundi, No. 97, Winter, 1993, pp. 169-81.

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 Olds's fourth book of poems, The Father, is easily one of the oddest ever published—even, one of the most outrageous. Consider: a sequence of fifty-one poems on the poet's ghoulish, erotic death-watch of her father, who was hospitalized for cancer, and the grieving aftermath. His dying both steps up and makes safe (unrealizable) her lust to be him and to have him: she is Electra, a babe who will suck from his "primary tumor," a mother who will take his dead body inside her womb, a cannibal who will eat his ashes ("There are people who will swallow whole / cars, piece by piece"—"The Urn"). "Isn't it something...