A Thought on Sharon Olds

In Sharon Olds’ “Photograph of the Girl” and “The Food-Thief”, Olds provides the reader with a momentary glimpse into the life of a single individual in a third world country. I use the word “momentary” very specifically here because it seems as though both poems were written in response to a moment in time captured within a picture. Therefore, even though these poems each take up about the length of a page, all Olds’ description and emphasis within each simply covers the span of a millisecond. Her ability to evoke such emotional distress not only in the main characters being described but also in the reader within such a limited time frame only confirms her mastery of the art.
These two poems work well for comparison. “Photograph of the Girl” is about a girl (obviously) in Russia during the drought of 1921. “The Food-Thief” is about a man in Uganda also during a period of drought though it’s hard to say when or which one since Uganda is historically famous (or infamous) for its intolerable living conditions. Despite the difference in location, Olds uses specific language and diction in each poem to illustrate the point that it doesn’t matter where you are or when, people (men and women) suffer alike under relatively same circumstances. It is this language and diction that gives life to the pictures making the intangible tangible for the reader allowing for the message to hit home.
It is Olds’ description of the bodies of the male and female character that truly provoke the senses. She carefully manipulates words so that, at least in the cases of these two poems, the human body, though dying in front of her, in front of the reader, is still portrayed as this amazing work of art … Almost as if they weren’t dying at all. She reveals a strange beauty within the decay.
For example, in “Photograph of the Girl”, and speaking of the girl, Olds says, “She cannot be not beautiful, but she is starving” and later in the poem she describes eggs from the girl’s ovaries as “golden as drops of rain.” There is so much life in these statements because of the way in which Olds words them, but they are essentially informing the reader of the death of something beautiful. Likewise, in “The Food-Thief”, she exemplifies this concept when she says, “He turns to them with all the eloquence of the body, the wrist turned out and the vein up his forearm running like a root just under the surface” and later in the poem when she says, “His lips are open to his brothers as the body of a woman might be open . . . the lines on his lips fine as the thousand tributaries of a root-hair.” This last line which equates the male and female body in the same context further provides substance for the beauty within men and the struggle for survival which escapes neither man nor woman.