Blood, Tin, Straw: Poems
In such previous collections asThe Gold CellandThe Dead and the  Living, Sharon Olds tends to draw her impetus from the sexual landscape. The  same might be said of the poems inBlood, Tin, Straw. Here, however, the libido is less invariably at center stage. Instead, Olds embraces her favorite subject--the body--in many different guises: as  an object of love, desire, reproduction, and decay.At its best,Blood, Tin, Strawcaptures effervescent moments  with delectable poignancy. In "The Necklace," for example, the narrator  recalls a falling strand of pearls that "spoke in oyster Braille on my chest."  (She likens the pearls to the snake in the Garden of Eden, yet this beaded serpent seems more intimately related to her own family romance.) And  in "My Father's Diary"--itself a strange precursor to the poems inThe Father--Olds identifies the chronicle of a life with its departed creator:My father dead, who had left methese small structures of his young brain--he wanted me to know him, he wantedsomeone to know him.Still, Olds has a tendency to trip over her own misspent innuendo. One  poem in particular, "Coming of Age, 1966," collapses under the weight of a fabricated personal nostalgia, as the poet conflates her own writer's  block with Nick Ut's famous photograph of a napalmed Vietnamese girl: "Every time / I tried to write of the body's gifts, / the child with her  clothes burned off by napalm / ran into the poem screaming." Olds pins the  blame for this atrocity (and for her writer's block!) on Lyndon Johnson. Yet  the photo dates from 1972, which lets LBJ off the hook and points the  finger at Richard Nixon. It may seem ludicrous to condemn a poem for being  factually incorrect. However, the entire argument here is predicated upon  Johnson's culpability in delaying the narrator's "entrance into the erotic." Offensive and overwrought, "Coming of Age, 1966" exemplifies Olds's  worst poetic impulses. She does, it should be said, retain much of her appeal  inBlood, Tin, Straw. Yet there's still a sense that she's  substituting a tried-and-true trademark for her customary, earnest ease.--Ryan Kuykendall--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.