'Ms. Olds Renders the Personal Universal': Dwight Garner Reviews Sharon Olds's Odes

Dwight Garner assesses Sharon Olds ("Laureate of Sexuality") and her latest book, Odes: "As a writer, she’s always gotten an illicit thrill from pushing boundaries, whether scrutinizing sex or motherhood or parents or illness (but sex especially)." More, via the New York Times:

Sharon Olds feels bad about her neck. In her new book there is a poem called “Ode to Wattles,” and it is about what you suspect it’s about: the poet’s “face hanging down from the bottom of my face,” the “slackness of the drapery.”

In the mirror, Ms. Olds is shocked yet thrilled at her visage. Old age — “my crone beauty, in its first youth” — has given her fresh subject matter, which she does not intend to waste. She writes:

I love to be a little
disgusting, to go as far as I can
into the thrilling unloveliness
of an elderwoman’s aging.

No one who has kept up with Ms. Olds’s work needs to be told that she loves to be a little disgusting. As a writer, she’s always gotten an illicit thrill from pushing boundaries, whether scrutinizing sex or motherhood or parents or illness (but sex especially).

The critic Helen Vendler, not a fan, has called her work pornographic. The nimbleness and electricity of Ms. Olds’s best sex poems, however, will not be denied. These poems declare, as vividly as did Janis Joplin: Honey, get it while you can.

Continue at the New York Times.