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The Matter Of This World, New and Selected Poems By Sharon Olds, Slow Dancer Press, Flat 4, Arundel House, 1 Park Valley, the Park, Nottingham, NG7 1BS. 60pp, £4.00.

Sharon Olds’ poetry works at the point where language gives way to trust, where language becomes action. At the point where language-making and the senses cannot be separated, so that pleasure is, partly, language. She discovers a kind of animal compassion, which she calls human, that judges through its responses, to pain, to loveliness, or to passion, and not with recourse to a set of moral principles abstracted from those responses. This does not imply a thoughtless, amoral sensuality, but an acceptance that thought, mind, ethics, are bound to the senses, have their origins in our flesh:

                                                                     if
                         I had a God it would renew itself the
                         way you live and live while I take you as if
                         consuming you while you take me as if 
                         consuming me, it would be a God of
                         love as complete satiety

                                                               (Greed And Aggression)

This kind of logic arises from the senses, rather than from an attempt to circumvent them with a set of moral proscriptions, and as such, being based on research and experience, it is foolproof, impeccable. Sharon Olds’ language can thus allow within itself the confluence and fusion of apparently contradictory impulses, mutually catalytic oppositions that exist among each other in the way skin, muscle, blood and bone are alive only by inclusion: they cannot be singular in the manner of words. Our qualities are not separable, as in a list, but happen as ourselves; thus kindness and force, for example, become one in a child’s unpremeditated responsiveness. When we lose touch with our childhood, or belittle it, we lose this responsiveness and can only judge: A is ugly, B is not.

Yet these poems are not an argument far regression to a child’s view of the world, but a demand to go forward through experience without the armour of habit, opinion, convention, to what the child so rarely becomes if forced into society’s role models: a whole being tempered by force and kindness, always at risk yet always full of grace. Because of this, reading these poems is, for me, a sensual experience; I am persuaded into them by their deft loveliness; I am led through beauties and horrors that are my own by virtue of this shared sensuality; and I am suddenly brought to a moment of compassion for and comprehension of the “matter of this world” from which we are all made:

                                                          I sit on the
                         toilet in the dark, you are somewhere in the room, I
                         open the window and the snow has fallen in a
                         deep drift against the pane, I
                         look up into it, a
                         world of cold crystals, silent and
                         glistening so I call out to you and you
                         come and hold my hand and I say
                         I cannot see beyond it! I cannot see beyond it!

                                                                                    (True Love)

These are shocking poems, and miraculous, that can show us the limits of the world as the sources of joy and understanding.