[The Dead and the Living] explores the bonds of love and terror that hold a family together. This beautifully structured collection, the Lamont poetry selection for 1983, moves from public to private, from poems for the dead to poems for the living. Always, Sharon Olds's voice is a private one, even in the "public" poems. She insists on making us see the intimate details of public atrocities: the "pale spider-belly head" of a newborn dead in Rhodesia, the face of a starving girl in Russia, the "blazing white shirts" of white men in Tulsa race riots. Her images in this first section of poems are as unflinching and immediate as news photographs.

Sharon Olds takes risks. This is clear as we move into her "private" poems for the dead and the living. "My bad grand-father wouldn't feed us," begins a poem called "The Eye." "He turned the lights out...