SOURCE: "The Belabored Scene, The Subtlest Detail: How Craft Affects Heat in the Poetry of Sharon Olds and Sandra McPherson," in The Hollins Critic, Vol. XXIX, No. 1, February, 1992, pp. 1-9.

Brown-Davidson is an American writer and educator. In the following excerpt, she argues that the poems in The Gold Cell are overdramatic and self-indulgent.

I am a poet of excess, Definition, "poet of excess": writer who craves the piled-up instead of the pared-down. I recall sitting, as a child, in the darkened classroom as the projector whirred and I waited for the first dead-gray stills of Columbus and his ships to flash onto the screen. I preferred the shock-green effect of a giant floating Gumby, the whirlagig colors of the Mother Goose doll in her bonnet who would speak to us, hectically flushed, from the faded classroom screen. What can I say? As a child I wrote murder...