SOURCE: "Witness and Transformation," in Christianity and Crisis, Vol. 47, No. 19, January, 1988, pp. 453-54.

In the following excerpt, Moyer discusses Olds's incorporation of personal pain and tragedy into her poetry.

"We crave getting into each other's pain," Sharon Olds said in a workshop a summer ago, and in her three books, Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, and The Gold Cell, she lays open her own. In a poem about her parents' first meeting, she exhorts them to "Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it." She does, the alcoholism, cruelty, incest. Through all, she is the survivor, not only recording but—with the accuracy of her pictures and the clarity of her understanding—transforming.

In the long title poem of her first collection, Satan Says, she pictures herself as trying to write her way out of a little cedar box:

 ……..Satan
comes...