Sharon Olds - the 'poet'

[The Tourist]

Has anyone else had the misfortune to read her work?
Yesterday in my seminar I said how I thought that she was nothing special, I barely got a response from anyone. All anyone could do was heap praise on her because she had the balls to talk about her vagina and childbirth. It wasn't the subject matter that I found troublesome, I just found her poetry cliche and quite simply boring, there were no secrets divulged and she didn't add anything to what is already known. Perhaps it was revelatory to the people in my class, I was just a bit pissed off since most of them are 30 years my senior and I thought they'd be able to be a little more critical of someone of such pedestrian talent.

[Kinbote]

She kept her songs, they kept so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
And coloured, by her daughter -
So they had waited, till, in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.

[Atomsk Iscariot]

Larkin does make everything better.