Sharon Olds has established herself as a major American poet whose themes of sexuality and power as daughter, wife, and mother are of particular importance to women. Besides depicting family life, she describes global and political events with sensitivity toward the victims of oppression. Her family poems feature striking comparisons between her family and larger institutions of nations. Olds's strength as a poet lies in her persistent and frank use of erotic imagery in writing about the body as she describes puberty, menstruation, sexual love, childbirth, aging, and dying. She connects these life stages to her own and her children's coming-of-age and to her parents', and records the physical directly and affirmatively. In doing so she has founded a tradition of writing about the body for women poets who have followed her.

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco on 19 November 1942 and educated at Stanford University (B.A...