SOURCE: "Empty Beds, Empty Nests, Empty Cities," in The New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1993, pp. 14, 16.

Zeidner is an American novelist, poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, she offers a mixed review of The Father.

William Butler Yeats declared that "only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood—sex and the dead." Sharon Olds has set out to prove his point, writing with ferocious clarity about the body and "the world / of the nerves," site of all delight and despair. While the message is hardly new, what has catapulted Ms. Olds to the forefront of American poets is her fearless, gritty celebration of a woman's physical nature, not just in lovemaking but in menstruation, childbirth and motherhood. There's refreshingly little mist in her mysticism.

Her fourth collection, The Father, is a series of poems about a daughter's bedside vigil...