SOURCE: "Fathers and Daughters and Mothers and Poets," in The New York Times Book Review, March 22, 1987, p. 23.

Libby is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, taken from a mixed review of The Gold Cell, he asserts that Olds's poems are hampered by a preoccupation with morbidity, physicality, and brutality.

Though it inhabits the same general psychic territory [as Carolyn Kizer's poetry], Sharon Olds's poetry is as raw as Carolyn Kizer's is cooked. The Gold Cell is also a collection about men and boys, fathers and sons. But it enters with an unusual savagery into the familiar arena of Oedipal strife that has been so central to American poetry since mid-century—since Lowell, Roethke, and Plath. Miss Olds's intentionally brutal tone is set early, in one of her few narratives of nonfamilial violence. In "In the Cell" her mind wanders almost arbitrarily from idle contemplation of...