SOURCE: "The Forbidden," in Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, The Ecco Press, 1994, pp. 53-63.

Glück is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, she faults the poems in The Father for being repetitive.

Sharon Olds is a poet of considerable achievement and a wholesome distaste for that most depressing of strategies, the obligatory elevation of the quotidian via mythic analogy. Olds' technique, her fascination with the extreme physical, the unsayable reality, makes a case for her presence here, and The Father seems, atmospherically, to draw on or suggest taboos it doesn't actually investigate. Olds has an astonishing gift for that part of the act of writing which corresponds to the hunting/gathering phase, or, to put it another way, that part which is generative: many of the poems in The Father read as improvisations around a single word or cluster of words, and...