And with his disappearance, the motive for rebellion also largely disappears. More and more she insists on the holiness of sex, as the ultimate rebuke to those who call it unholy. This is how Olds has arrived at the fetishism of the ordinary that is so widespread in poetry today. Olds's angle is somewhat different. In a positively metaphysical way, she is declaring facts, especially bodily facts, to be good because for so long she was told that they were evil.
Olds writes pantheistic porn.
But this hymning of the facts is simply another way of bearding the universe, of arbitrarily investing certain precincts of experience with transcendent value. Beneath all the surface agitation, all the vulgar language, the programmatically unfeminine sexual bravado, there is a deadening certainty that makes each poem unsurprising. The reader will congratulate himself on the magnitude of his sensitivity, his openness to the holy in the profane. The narrowness of Olds's sensibility extends to Olds's style, which never varies. And it is here, at the level of style, that Olds diverges from Sylvia Plath, the much better poet with whom she has some similarities.