Satanic mills. (Verse chronicle).(Book Review)

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 has made this odd mixture of revulsion, false modesty, and self-aggrandizement her own. She understands that poetry is responsive to emotion; but, as she tears her hair and bares her breasts and shows you her vagina, you think, How pathetic, not What remarkable poems. She has made her private pathologies the gossip of the pavement; yet, as she has become more fluent and more practiced (the poet of Satan Says, her debut volume of almost a quarter-century ago, was fiercer but more brittle), her persona has grown glassy-eyed, begging for attention, pleading for sympathy. The poems are now ground out like sausages. Olds once said in an interview that she lays aside her first drafts until she can work them into finished poems, and that she was then fifteen years behind. You wonder if they're in mini-storage somewhere.

To every boy ever deprived of dinner, every girl who has had her mouth washed out with soap, her poems say, "There, there. One day you can turn all this into poetry." Few poets have examined their bodies more minutely (you feel she hides a speculum in her purse) or taken more childish satisfaction in announcing everything they find. No matter the subject (menopause, masturbation, abortion, teenage lesbianism), no matter how intimate the anatomy, it is discussed in the same reasonable, droning Surgeon General monotone. Olds has watched herself grow old, with mingled fascination and dread:

 
Yet when 
 
   I look down, I can see, sometimes, 
   things that if a young woman saw she would 
   scream, as if at a horror movie, 
   turned to a crone in an instant--if I lean 
   far enough forward, I can see the fine 
   birth skin of my stomach pucker 
   and hang, in tiny peaks, like wet stucco.