SOURCE: A review of The Matter of This World: New & Selected Poems, in Stand Magazine, Vol. 30, No. 1, Winter, 1988–89, pp. 74-5.

Pybus is an English editor, educator, and poet. In the excerpt below, he praises Olds's focus on physicality, autobiography, and parent-child relationships in The Matter of This World.

The American Sharon Olds has made a very strong selection from her three earlier USA volumes, and added a handful of new poems for her first British publication [The Matter of this World: New Selected Poems]. Her work generates so much physical presence, explores so palpably the relationship between a woman's body, feeling and mind, that the surrender or revelation of intimate details is less embarrassing than an occasion for gratitude. She writes almost exclusively here about her childhood, her troubled relationship with her parents and her father's death from cancer, her love for her own children. Most of all...