Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, September 7, 2008; BW12

Even 33 years after I first read Sharon Olds, I remember the fresh shock her poems delivered like a body blow. She's a keen student of the human mind, and no aspect of the agony and bliss we inflict on each other is off limits. In "The Sisters of Sexual Treasure," when the speaker and her sibling escape a brutal childhood home aflame with Calvinism, they begin behaving promiscuously, as though to obliterate their cruel mother with "her tiny sparrow body and narrow/grasshopper legs." Olds colors these freeing adventures in the dark tones of our ultimate taboo:

The men's bodies

were like our father's body! The massive

hocks, flanks, thighs, male

structure of the hips, knees, calves --

we could have him there, the steep forbidden

buttocks.

She eases us into this outrageous idea with a metaphor, which concludes by reintroducing the girls' need to escape their punishing mother:

Like explorers who

discover a lost city, we went

nuts with joy, undressed the men

slowly and carefully, as if

uncovering buried artifacts that

proved our theory of the lost culture:

that if Mother said it wasn't there,

it was there.

The same savage carnality that makes Olds's early poems so arresting finds form in her later poems about love and its attendant disappointments. In "The Unswept," the detritus of many meals are imagined.

Broken bay leaf. Olive pit.

Crab leg. Claw. Crayfish armor.

Whelk shell. Mussel shell. Dogwinkle. Snail.

Wishbone tossed unwished on. Test

of sea urchin. Chicken foot.

Wrasse skeleton. Hen head,

eyes shut, beak open as if

singing in the dark. Laid down in tiny

tiles, by the rhyparographer,

each scrap has a shadow -- each shadow cast

by a different light. Permanently fresh

husks of the feast! When the guest has gone,

the morsels dropped on the floor are left

as food for the dead -- O my characters,

my imagined, here are some fancies of crumbs

from under love's table.

Notice that the bay leaf is broken, and how many hard items follow: the pit of the olive, the various shells (like the wavy-shelled dogwinkle, which feeds on mussels). Even the wishbone is "unwished on," suggesting someone too blighted to hope. Maybe Olds is mocking critics who've complained that she neglects language in favor of narrative clarity and psychological insight, but this poem proves for me her linguistic and metaphorical genius.

("The Sisters of Sexual Treasure" and "The Unswept" are from "Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002." Copyright 2004 by Sharon Olds. Reprinted with permission of Knopf.)

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."