Kissing and Telling: April Warman reviews Selected Poems by Sharon Olds

Reading this selection, one is persuaded that there can be nothing that Olds will not write about, and write about with a directness that defies us to feel that there could be anything wrong in the open discussion of anything and everything. The poems range from frank and explicit celebration of Olds’s relationship with her husband, to the pat confessionalism of ‘After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood’, to a harrowing (yet curiously carefree) account of the rape and attempted murder of a twelve-year-old girl. The motivating force behind this catholicism appears to be a kind of high-minded refusal of embarrassment, a bracing challenge to a society which, through a (presumably damaging) prioritisation of taste and decency, holds certain subjects taboo. The question the poems seem to ask is, given that these things happen in real life, why should they not be written about, as frankly and directly as possible?

This shrugging off of social constraints results in a strangely desocialised persona. At its best, this is manifested in an utterly detached gaze, which relishes detail and defamiliarisation rather than social meaning, and is not unlike that of the Martian poets (who began publishing around the same time as Olds herself). An absence of normal human reaction appears to allow for a flowering of artistic conceit: when her dying father shows her his emaciated body, she sees ‘the folds of skin like something / poured, a thick batter’ (‘The Lifting’); a child about to cry has ‘silver flashes in her eyes like distant / bodies of water glimpsed through woods.’ (‘The Talk’) We see a ‘cut-crystal decanter, its future / shards in upright bound sheaves.’ (‘Wonder’)

More often, however, Olds’s rejection of niceties is performed through wide-eyed display, seeming to reject artistry in favour of the stagily artless. A photograph of her parents before their marriage prompts the reflection:

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it – she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. (‘I Go Back to May 1937’)

The heavy repetition of ‘you are going to’ works to suggest a persona too candid and transparent, too tranced by her apprehension, even to vary her phrasing. The anaphora used here is actually a rare instance in Olds’s work – much more frequent is the kind of arbitrary line break of ‘they are / innocent’, which by its very randomness might imply unmediated experience. In this poem, the childhood trauma that is documented in grinding detail elsewhere in the volume is reduced to ‘bad things to children’; the parents’ relative lack of culpability at the time of the photograph is simplified to, and patronised in, ‘all they know is they are/ innocent’. Olds seems to be attempting a stripping down of perception, a removal of adult, socialised sophistication and interpretation, to reveal and proclaim the bare ‘truth’ of her parents’ marriage.

Yet the truly telling thing about this poem is the way that affected transparency ultimately serves to direct our attention not towards the moment depicted, but to the concerns of the speaker. It ends,

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

This ending creates a narrative in which all the projected pain of her parents’ existence finds a (possibly redemptive) significance in their daughter’s will to live and ‘tell’. Olds’s rejection of reticence is not purely a strategy for the frank transmission of experience; in its extraordinary, often repellent, candour, it functions to make us aware of her courage, or iconoclasm, or brazenness, in breaking social constraints, in ‘tell[ing] about it’.

And there are some things one really should not share with a reading public. I am thinking here not of the material details given of Olds’s life – though she often seems to invest these with a great deal of significance - but of her attitudes towards them. In the series of poems on the death of her father from throat cancer, it is one thing to be faced with ‘the glass of mucus […] like a glass of beer foam […] shiny and faintly yellow […] full of bubbles and moving around like yeast’ (‘The Glass’): there is the unpleasant feeling that Olds is pulling moral, or experiential, rank in forcing us to digest (sorry!) such moments, but at least they objectively happened, and her experience of them was involuntary. When, however, she asks us to contemplate her father, when told of his terminal illness, ‘thin, and clean, in his clean gown, / like a holy man’ (‘His Stillness’), the unapologetic sentimentality of the comparison has no such excuse.

Olds seems to feel a need to invest everything (and particularly everyone) associated with her with the kind of extremity and significance suggested by that image of her father as ‘holy man’. Anticipating her daughter’s return from college, she claims, ‘She will sleep in this apartment, / her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a / soul in a body’ (‘First Thanksgiving’). Of her husband’s iris, she declares, ‘I have never seen a curve / like that, except our sphere, from outer / space.’ Later: ‘By knowing him, I get to know / the purity of the animal / which mates for life.’ (‘The Knowing’) The oddly dissatisfied effect of this (people not seeming enough in themselves – needing to be compared with souls and spheres, invested with untamedness and purity) gives the lie to the poems’ ostensible claim to present unmediated experience. Such disproportionate language seems not to describe intensity, but to try to heighten, even create it. When her own touch on her husband is likened to ‘the wind travelling the contours of the world / a wind that comes when those who loved / the dead are allowed to touch them again’ (‘The Native’), there is absolutely no way that a reader can apprehend her grounds for such a comparison: the image is not used to communicate anything substantial – only its inherent extremity. The impression is of poetry being used to boost experience; the reader can feel uneasily implicated in this, as if we are asked to provide, in the reactions her heightened language incites, an affirmation lacking in things as they are.

One of the strangest things about this volume is that Olds seems not unaware of such tendencies in herself. The last five lines of ‘I Go Back to May 1937’ provide the book’s epigraph: ‘Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it’ is, explicitly, her ars poetica. ‘Grey Girl’ contrasts her own situation with those of friends who have experienced racism and persecution; in it she castigates herself as a ‘thirster after substance’, and asks (of herself), ‘Who did she / think she was, to relish herself / for hating herself […]?’ Who indeed? But the question is not answered; the poem instead declines into, and ends with, a vaguely redemptive prelapsarian rhetoric:

All evening I looked at my friends’
womanly beauty, and manly beauty,
and the table with its wines, and meats, and fruits,
and flowers, as if we could go back to the beginning.

Any chance that Olds might discern the dubious moral value of her self-regard is lost to a more comfortable self-congratulation at (apparently) her ability to appreciate the finer things in life. She seems to take all aspects of herself as equal grist to the mill of her self-exploration and -display: a dying father has the same confessional value as an unattractive self-pitying streak.

This odd absence of responsibility for her self as it is presented to us is a part of the weird detachedness that comes across throughout the book. Self-regard, after all, requires that the self be divided into the roles of seer and seen. The moment of recognition in ‘Grey Girl’ comes when ‘I glimpsed myself for a second / in a store window’; ‘I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror’ culminates in the declaration:

she looked at me so directly, her eyes all
pupil, her stare said to me I
belong here, this is mine, I am living out my
true life on this earth.

The apparent need to make such a basic, obvious assertion, and the desire to do so through a contrived third-person voice, is disconcerting. It suggests that Olds cannot see herself, perhaps cannot believe in herself, unless she is seeing through another’s eyes. When made explicit, as here, this may present a valid theme for exploration. The problem, through much of her work, is that one gets the uncomfortable feeling that the eyes she is so rapaciously after are one’s own.

Selected Poems, Sharon Olds (Jonathan Cape, £12.00

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