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Article: The Father.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- December 14, 1992
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1992 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE FATHER. By Sharon Olds. Knopf. 79 pp. $20. Paper $11.
Through four volumes of poetry-Satan Says (1980), The Dead and the Living (1984), The Gold Cell (1987) and now
The Father--Sharon Olds has engendered a body of work that speaks largely in a voice that is first-person singular. Natural in form (the cadences feel right, like rhythms of the body), conversational in tone, her poems often embrace matters that are unnatural, horrifying, inhuman.
Subjected, with her siblings, to abuse from both parents (poems that relate this history abound in her second and third books), Olds struggles to define herself within the context of the family into ...