SOURCE: "Private Parts: Sharon Olds's Poems Don't Shy Away from Physicality," in The New York Times Book Review, September 15, 1996, p. 15.

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 Eavan Boland's domestic interiors, and addressed with the affectionate wisdom of Donald Hall, it might become the kind of body Sharon Olds celebrates in The Wellspring—sensual, familiar, beloved. These new poems, her fifth collection, describe the poet's "apprenticeship to the mortal" from her prenatal memories through adult sexuality, from "My First Weeks" through "Celibacy at Twenty" to "True Love."

The bodies she writes about—her mother's, father's, lovers', children's, husband's—exist with all their genetic histories and reproductive organs fully visible to the poet. To visit her mother's college is to remember a time...