The Dead and the Living Book

I saw that others were reading this review, so I pulled out this book at dawn and reread it and edited/ added some things in my review. Like this poem:

Possessed (for my parents)

I have never left.
Your bodies are before me
at all times, in the dark I see
the stars of your teeth in their fixed patterns
wheeling over my bed, and the darkness
is your hair, the fragrance of your two heads
over my crib, your body-hairs
which I count as God counts the feathers of the sparrows,
one by one. And I never leave your sight,
I can look in the eyes of any stranger and
find you there, in the rich swimming
bottom-of-the-barrel brown, or in the
blue that reflects from the knife's blade,
and I smell you always, the dead cigars and
Chanel in the mink, and I can hear you coming,
the slow stopped bear tread and the
quick fox, her nails on the ice,
and I dream the inner parts of your bodies, the
coils of your bowels like smoke, your hearts
opening like jaws, drops from your glands
clinging to my walls like pearls in the night.
You think I left'I was the child
who got away, thousands of miles,
but not a day goes past that I am not
turning someone into you.
Never having had you, I cannot let you go, I
turn now, in the fear of this moment,
into your soft stained paw
resting on her breast, into your breast trying to
creep away from under his palm'
your gooseflesh like the shells of a thousand tiny snails,
your palm like a streambed gone dry in summer.

This is a great volume of poetry. Why is it I, having begun to read her thirty years ago and more, never read this book, the most and most highly reviewed one on Goodreads? Not sure. I may have picked it up and saw poems about her kids and I had no kids, maybe thought the edge would come off her Satan Says voice and become sentimental because of that, and of course I would have reason to believe it would, because we do, I do, other poets do, but she does not. The same threatening, sinister, unpredictable, sometimes hostile world remains, but now threatens her children as it did her. Once again we see the body is so central in Olds: Vibrant, buoyant, youthful bodies and aging, decaying and dying, decomposing bodies; the sexual body certainly, full of a sex that beckons, threatens, this powerful force that is always there.

How are these poems alike and different than her last book, about her divorce, Stag's Leap? The unstintingly look at the self, and family, in the older Olds, in Stag's Leap, is there from the beginning, the rage, the passion, the autobiographical narrative drive, the "confessional" sharing of painful details from her life, but in this book, maybe her best from a "literary" perspective, she is more lyrical, more open to dramatic metaphor. Language, powerful language, is more central here than in the later work.

In Stag's Leap the language is a bit more stripped down, more narrative, less patient with the poetic/literary separation between experience and life. The language in The Dead and the Living is often gorgeous, and one can see how three great poets like June Jordan, Charles Simic, and David Wagoner (amazing committee!) might have chosen it for the 1983 Lamont Prize in Poetry (for second books). My favorites are NOT the ones about children, though, in spite of my now having my own brood; they are, as always, the poems about her sisters and brothers and grandparents and especially the deliciously vicious ones of her mother and father, the poems of not blind but completely eyes-open rage at the emotional and physical and sexual abuse of her childhood, where I voyeuristically peer around the corners of pages into the very car wrecks of her past.

I like the few poems here about photographs, the (always!) unsentimental portraits and elegies for the dead that are not her own, but the edge is off when talking about Marilyn Monroe, they have not hurt her (though somehow even that poem is about Olds and kinds of objectification and abuse in an amazing way) as her family has done to her. I make it seem like here is no joy in these poems but there is on almost every page, and there's wit and humor, too, and passionate love and passionate sex and passionate language, exulting in that. I think I am going to reread everything I have read from her and write, write, write, my own life. We all should!