SOURCE: "The Matter and Spirit of Death," in Suffering and the Remedy of Art, State University of New York Press, 1997, pp. 171-84.

Schweizer is an educator and critic. In the following essay, he discusses the therapeutic aspects of the poems in The Father, concluding that the volume "is a book in search of a catharsis and clarification of fear and pity."

Sharon Olds' poetic sequence The Father records her father's death from cancer. Each breath, cough, spit of mucus, and stool is accounted for. The book is obsessed with waiting, with breathing, with bodily functions of the most intimate and ultimate kind, as if the poet wanted to wrest a secret from the slow process of dying, being present to her father's dying so as not to miss the split second when the secret might leap out of the body. The book lingers, at times with an astonishing...