More than fifty years ago, during the Truman administration, Sharon Olds’s parents tied her to a chair, and she has been writing about it ever since. The Unswept Room[1] revisits the realistic dioramas of her childhood, pays homage to the frequently dusted waxwork head of that villain her father—you think you’ve stumbled, not into some strange museum of natural history, but into Madame Tussaud’s.
Olds writes lines of clean American prose, the kind poets chop up in order to call it poetry. Such lines have an artful plainness, like that of Shaker furniture, but also a spiritual dullness—she seems to suffer through the exposition to get to the good bits. Say she has the uncomfortable feeling that she’s just met someone. Someone foreign. Or someone dead, then alive. No, not Jesus—she saw Jesus last night on the ceiling. No:
Whom had I found who had been lost to me? I
could not think—and then, I remembered
the round, plump, woven-silver
mirror, which I had held, this bright
morning, between my legs, I had seen,
for the first time, myself, face to feral face.
Oh, of course, her own vagina. The grammar of her last sentence is shaky, but the set-up is as impeccable as the bad taste.
As performance artist, drama queen, heiress to the extremity of Plath and Sexton, Olds has long been anything but a poet. There really ought to be another name for what she is. At sixty, she
