These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other's eyes.
The title of this poem naturally leads one to expect an elegy of some kind on the memory of its title subject; one of the most famous women of the 20th century. Instead, the poem is about the paramedics called to the scene of her overdose and the reaction to the fact that they could not save her life.
My mother is a pimp. Something
opens and breaks when I say that.
With these lines from the title poem of her first collection, Olds introduced her mother. Over the course of several collections and hundreds of poems, Olds will add layer upon layer of historical context, subjective opinion and narrative information which affords the reader the opportunity to go back to this shocking introduction and attempt to make sense of it.
Somehow I never stopped to notice
that my father liked to dress as a woman.
One of the many poems about her father, the opening line introduces the reader to an aspect of this man both familiar and unfamiliar. Other poems about make clear the disdain for women which inspires his go-to choice for costume parties. The disdain is here layered with a newly uncomfortable image of a man who is revealed to enjoy a certain level of unexpected comfort in the trappings of femininity, even if that feminine persona is constructed upon a solid foundation of misogynistic stereotype.
While he told me, I looked from small thing
to small thing in our room, the face
of the bedside clock, the sepia postcard
of a woman bending down to a lily.
This is the opening line to the opening poem from the collection which details the disintegration of Olds’ marriage. Like so many moments from so many of her poems, the intimacy being described here is almost too intensely personal to read without feeling like a voyeur. The reader is witnessing an actual recollection of a memory of a woman of the very moment her husband confessed to cheating on her. It is a confession made at the beginning of the collection that ultimately leads to breakup of a marriage by the end of the collection.
My daughter has turned against eggs.
Here is an excellent (eggs-cellent?) example of one of the greatest strengths of Olds as a poet. She has a knack for opening lines that immediately hook a reader. What is especially telling about this talent is that not only can she come up with a fantastically resonant opening line such as this, but that so often these enticing openings leave room for imaginative flights of fancy. Will this line lead a humorous observation of a simple moment in time or it will serve as a metaphor for a deeper and more symbolic analysis and examination of an issue stretching well past the immediate present of the moment.
