SOURCE: "Knows Father Best," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 255, No. 20, December 14, 1992, pp. 748-50.

Lesser is an American poet, translator, critic, and educator. In the following review of The Father, she examines the volume's autobiographical focus.

Through four volumes of poetry—Satan Says (1980), The Dead and the Living (1984), The Gold Cell (1987) and now The Father—Sharon Olds has engendered a body of work that speaks largely in a voice that is first-person singular. Natural in form (the cadences feel right, like rhythms of the body), conversational in tone, her poems often embrace matters that are unnatural, horrifying, inhuman.

Subjected, with her siblings, to abuse from both parents (poems that relate this history abound in her second and third books), Olds struggles to define herself within the context of the family into which she was born as well as the family she herself has made. Rarely is the speaker...