Gold Cell, Vol. 25 Book

I think "The Gold Cell" rests more comfortably in the 3.5 star space, but alas. Is this a great volume? Not to my mind. It is a quite good one, very solid in places, and stunning in a few. The thing is, just as it shines brightly in some moments, it falls entirely dull at others. I found the section on her father (the second?) to be particularly trying to work through. The book is broken into four parts: one outside of the biographical (?) narrator's vantage point; one directed to her father; one to her lovers and concerning her sexuality; one regarding the experiences and sensations of motherhood.

Knowing me--as you don't--and my unadulterated idolatry of poets like Plath and Sexton, this book should have floored me. As I said, when Olds is able to boil something down, she can be incredibly effective. See the poems "Cambridge Elegy," "The Girl," "Saturn," "The Quest," "Boy Out in the World," and "The Green Shirt." But at times, I find the criticism I've so often heard directed toward Olds--that she falls back on the crutch of shock-value when she's at a poem's weak space--to be justified. For all its humor, I simply cannot believe "The Pope's Penis" to be a great poem. A good one? Sure. A memorable one? Certainly. But for the life of me, I don't get why people blab on and on about that poem (or why I read that for a Modern Poetry course a couple of years ago) when they can look to her other more astonishingly written, deeply felt poems.

Moreover, the wild cries of how groundbreaking her work's breaking of taboos is seem to me slightly misguided. She's certainly speaking of often-silenced topics, but she's not really the first. Had she published this book two decades earlier, she'd have broken that ground; but as it stands, see (I hate to bring them up again) Plath or Sexton on a number of these topics: father/daughter incest; sexual or emotional violence against women; female sexuality; abortion; eroticism; &co&co. She hasn't done it first, though I certainly appreciate that she carries the torch in many respects.

I don't know how this turned into a pitchfork & torch review of the book. I did like it and certainly look forward to reading more Olds. So bottom line is this: the book is stunning at its best points and dreary at its worst. Other poems just get lost in the shuffle between the good and the bad. I'll be curious to pick up other books & see if they are more consistent in quality than this one was. I tend to agree with another reviewer here on GR--the poems are too often boring on the page even if exciting when read aloud. But ultimately, "Cambridge Elegy" is worth the price of admission alone.