The Unswept Room Book

The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds is a book of poetry published in 2005. Stag's Leap, published in 2012, documents the end of her 32-year marriage, with great pain and anguish, so it is tempting as I read this for (maybe) the first time, to examine The Unswept Room only in terms of that relationship, which over time in her poetry is passionate, sexual and intensely loving. Over time we don't so much get to know him as we get to know her view of him/them/their relational bodies, throughout her'what is sometimes called primarily by male critics'"confessional" poetry, (because men don't typically write about these subjects in the same way, they have to dismiss it in this way). But it is powerful, raw, fun, impressive, all of it.

Olds once said, "I write the way I perceive, I guess. It's not really simple, I don't think, but it's about ordinary things'feeling about things, about people. I'm not an intellectual. I'm not an abstract thinker. And I'm interested in ordinary life."

The body, primarily the female body, and hers in particular, from birth to death, from lover to mother to empty nester to mother caretaker is viscerally described and explored by Olds, and usually celebrated. Olds is the poetic daughter of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in all of their anguished and thrilled passion of the body. Who else writes so boldly about sex and birth and motherhood and abortion and aging/dying bodies? Beth Ann Fennelly comes to mind; Kim Addonizio. Many others, surely, but the anger and joy of sex comes through surely in Olds's poetry here and over time. The rage and despair she shares at the hands of her father's abuse is touched on here as in other places. But above all here, her sexual relationship with her husband is highlighted, written about beautifully and not trivially or sentimentally.

"Then, when we were joined, I became
shyer. I became completed, joyful"

But in "A Time of Passion" maybe we see the beginning of the end?

The poem opens:

"Then we entered a time of passion so
extreme it was almost calm, the body
doubling what it wanted to bear. Anguish
and pleasure played each other."

But ends:

"It never crossed my mind that he no longer
loved me, that we had left the realm of love."

Augh, the anguish, out of so much loving.

But for her a woman's body is always already sensually alive, even in the first hour of life, as in "First Hour:"

"The air
was softly touching my skin and tongue
entering and drawing forth the little
sighs I did not know as mine."

And in a session of kissing she has with a girlfriend and that girl's boyfriend. Alive, the world opening!

And in parenting and relating to her mother, always for Olds it is with her body and in terms of other women's bodies.

But she also writes of other men and their moments in these poems:

In "Bible Study: 71 B. C." she writes with rage of the crucifixion of Spartacus and 6,000 other people by Crassus. She writes with rage, too, of the memory of her father in restaurants putting his hands up waitresses' skirts and thinking,

"I wish I had stuck
A fork in that arm, driven the tines
Deep, heard the squeak of muscle
Felt the skid on bone."

Olds writes of race, kind of indirectly, in "Grey Girl":

"You want to know about white?
I'll tell you about white people
I lived in close proximity to them
And I was them, that meanness they used on me
Was what I was made of."

There's a lovely elegy to Jane Kenyon, in "April, New Hampshire."

She writes of losing a friend in an accident,
"Glass, bone, flesh and family:"

"This was the world, maybe the only one."

In "The Untangling," Olds talks of trying to untangle the detritus of love and family and sex: "pansy, peony, dusk, starry, unviolate." These disparate things that make us who we are.

Olds writes sort of wondrously and openly of her own vagina, and of seeing, as a young girl, her mother's vagina before entering the tub, so there's that physicality you either like or not, but it feels real and honest

She also writes tenderly of the wonder and grace of seeing her grown daughter and son sleeping in a room. She also writes of the moment of falling in love with her daughter:

"When she smiled at me
delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming
I fell in love, I became human."

So there's sweetness and the visceral, love and rage, in a powerful book from one of my favorite poets.