Olds, Sharon

Emotional Reflection of Complex Motherhood

Olds describes her poetry as emotional rather than cerebral. She rejects conventional images of the mother and refuses to either romanticize or demonize the maternal. For Olds, the mother is neither a self-sacrificing figure nor a dominant shrew. Instead, she emerges as a complex individual who is deeply affected by the world around her and the choices she makes, and who remains at the center of family life. Olds renders domestic portraits that convey the intimate details of everyday life. As she attends to detail, she illuminates nuanced, authentic representations—of her mother and herself—that offer the reader rare glimpses into motherhood and underscore the universal relevance of her maternal vision.

A profound interest in the female body as sensual and sexual is evident in numerous poems that probe the physical act of birth. In “The Borders,” for example, the speaker admits that “my mother swam in me and I/felt myself swum in.” Across Olds's works, the boundaries between daughter and mother are permeable, yet permanent. The speaker concedes that, having been born of her mother, daughter and mother remain forever bound, first in flesh, later in spirit. In a later poem, “The Moment the Two Worlds Meet,” the speaker recalls the birth of her own child as “the center of life,” when the “slick, whole body comes out of me,/…/it shines, it glistens with the thick liquid on it.” In fact, Olds's explicit portrayal of the physical body—puberty and the onset of menstruation, arousal and orgasm, heterosexual intercourse, the female body in labor, symptoms of menopause—is a distinguishing quality of her work. Through vivid images, she illuminates the physical and emotional ties that bind mothers and their offspring.

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