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's description of her terminally ill father in The Father.

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.

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 scenes of domestic violence and trauma.

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 and love in scenes of domestic violence and trauma. Wright also lauds the universality of Olds's political poems.

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 the theme of Eros, or erotic love. Ostriker concludes that although there are similarities between Bishop's and Olds's concepts of Eros, Bishop successfully addresses this theme and Olds does not.

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 previous books.

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 of painful subject matter.

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 for healing and empowering the divided self of the poet/narrator.

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 clarification of fear and pity."

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.

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.

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 sensationalistic.

Logan is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt from a review of Satan Says, he argues that Olds's violent metaphors and images are gratuitous and unsuited to the personal issues which are the focus of her poetry.

Lesser is an American poet, translator, critic, and educator. In the following review of The Father, she examines the volume's autobiographical focus.

Logan is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, he argues that Olds uses violent imagery unsuccessfully in Satan Says, adding that the poet is capable of writing better verse.

Keelan is an editor and poet. In the following excerpt, she offers a favorable assessment of The Father.

In the following essay, Sutton analyzes thematic and stylistic contrasts in the poem "Sex Without Love."

McDiarmid is an American educator and editor. In the following review of The Wellspring, she discusses Olds's celebration of the body.

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.

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 portraits.

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 and the Living, he compares Olds's poems to Sylvia Plath's and suggests that although Olds's work is flawed, its overall impact is powerful.

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, suffering, and sexuality.

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, physicality, and brutality.

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 narrative flow, yet faulting its haphazard structure and sensationalistic themes.

In the following review, Wills praises Olds's unsentimental and honest depiction of emotionally laden topics and social taboos in The Father.

Zeidner is an American novelist, poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, she offers a mixed review of The Father.

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.

Glück is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, she faults the poems in The Father for being repetitive.

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 more / tyings by the wrist to the chair, / no more denial of food" ("That Year"). Olds consistently sees her personal survival in terms of the primal, female relationships of Daughter, Mother and Lover. These are, in fact, three of the [four divisions of Satan Says], and the relationships quiver to life in poems bristling w...

Sharon Olds's first book [Satan Says], which is uncompromisingly autobiographical, is divided into sections titled for the roles in which she experiences herself, "Daughter," "Woman," and "Mother." There is also a fourth section, called "Journeys," which implicitly connects the three roles. The poems are passionate and, especially in the "Daughter" group, explosive with pain and anger. She moves (and usually persuades) us by the ve...

In the following excerpt, Moyer discusses Olds's incorporation of personal pain and tragedy into her poetry.

"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 from Tulsa, Okla., to Chile and from Rhodesia to Iran. O.K., we can take it. At this theatrical distance we are not touched to the core…. Such horrors are thawed by the rhythm of words: They remain static conundrums to be puzzled out with a meditative gaze. Only when this photographic technique of intimate exposure is transferred to her...

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 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 1983, moves from public to private, from poems for the dead to poems for the living. Always, Sharon Olds's voice is a private one, even in the "public" poems. She insists on making us see the intimate details of public atrocities: the "pale spider-belly head" of a newborn dead in Rhodesia, the face of a starvin...

In the following excerpt, Murray discusses Olds's passionate treatment of such subjects as pain, love, and anger in Satan Says.

In the following review, Stenstrom favorably assesses The Wellspring.

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 in Iran to her own miscarriage, Olds writes about the loss of life with passion, yet control. Her language is direct, her imagery vivid, her subjects credible. There is a poem about her aging grandmother, still witty and full of life, another about her mean grandfather who drank, and her father who resembled him. In "Poems for the Living,&...

[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 easily be shared: she focuses on simple, everyday occurrences and uses the poem to give them deeper meaning. There are a few first-book problems, such as an overuse of tough sexual words (which after a while seem thrown in for shock value), a self-consciousness about being a writer, too many similes, and a few images which verge on the superficial, ...

Sharon Olds' poems [in Satan Says] are perpetually balanced at the edge of hyperbolic violence—a balance maintained between the deep psychological sources of her poems and the vivid, many-layered imagery in which they are expressed…. There are poems of extreme emotions, and though Olds occasionally becomes mired in her own tendency toward bombast, the many poems that achieve their proper mixture of reality and nightmare are simply stunning. Sara Plath, in a review of ...