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Article: 'Never having had you, I cannot let you go': Sharon Old's poems of a father-daughter relationship.
- Article from:
- The Literary Review
- Article date:
- September 22, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 Fairleigh Dickinson University. 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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In her first three books of poetry - Satan Says (1980), The Dead and the Living (1984), The Gold Cell (1989) - as well as recently published poems not collected into book form, Sharon Olds describes a dysfunctional family misruled by a father whose abuse of power the poems' speaker responds to both as a child and an adult.(1) Rather than one full-length Prelude-like account, Olds offers snapshots, literally dozens of short poems, a few which metaphorically delineate the father damaging the family structure, and others which narrate in specific detail the father's brutal presence. One anthology of literature commonly used in introductory level classes features three poems ...