In her newest book, Sharon Olds delivers another powerful collection of poems that heal the heart and stir the soul. She makes it her duty to record each aspect of the physical world no matter how small it's aspect Writing with an urgency, reminiscent of the confessional narratives of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Olds exercises the power to move the reader to states of intuition, if not inspiration. She encourages her readers "to touch / stone desire, and know it." Perennial celebrant of the material world, she attempts "to find every cell" and, in so doing, to lead her audience to the "region of icy, absolute/ sensing." Olds's method of taming the horrific by wrapping it in beautiful images proliferates Blood, Tin, Straw. The ritually abused girl, tied to the chair, becomes "Daphne / halfway out of the wood" ("The Day They tied Me Up"). A woman's menstrual blood forms "a dazzling trail, the petals/ the flower-girl scatters under the feet of the bride." A father, caught sitting on the toilet, is depicted as "a shorn Lamb."

Olds's poems are litanies celebrating sexual desire. She wants her audience to understand the physical world as "the most real thing," a state of "colorless bliss," a "place beyond the other places, / beyond the body itself, permitting her readers to conceive "the world as heaven," with the "body at the edge of it." In fact, the greatest emphasis in Blood, Tin, Straw remains, singing the body beautiful, with Whitmanesque gusto. From a distinctly sexual, female perspective, she continues her commitment to praise the corporeal. Her poetry views the dialectic of life and death as the exultation of physical experience. Olds exuberantly gives her audience the human body, "pore by / pore." Whether she is describing "the supple fork-/lightning of each hair" or the titillation of "tiny gooseflesh bumps" , her goal is to leave her readers" stuffed to the spirit tips with touch."

While Olds continues to champion the cause of physicality, she also reveals her artistic and personal struggle with the dichotomy of body and soul and its ensuing dilemma of death and resurrection. In "Where Will Love Go?" Olds delivers herself up to her own philosophy of absolute materialism. In this poem, she contemplates nuclear holocaust as the annihilation of "the secret structure of matter." With the material world reduced to a "sphere of cold, turning ash," Olds confronts a hopeless reality where "love / is powerless, and means nothing."

Olds's inability reconcile the existence of a spiritual soul in a material universe is reiterated in "For and Against Knowledge," when she professes, "I have never understood the spirit," an admission she establishes in The Father. Perhaps Olds makes her strongest attempt to deal with the transcendental duality of body and soul in "Culture and Religion." Sewn carefully into the center of the collection, this poem, from which Blood, Tin, Straw takes its title, uses Hollywood's movie version of The Wizard of Oz to treat the topic of mortality. Olds focuses on the characters of the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow as metaphors dealing with issues of death and resurrection. On at least one level, Olds's solution to the problem of human mortality is threefold: a heart to appreciate life, courage to accept death, and a brain to acknowledge the difference. In her philosophy and her art, Olds stretches very human hands toward the "caress / of matter only,"urging all who would dare follow her. Blood, Tin, Straw is a substantial effort by a prolific poet to reconcile an alienated, modern world with "the dignity / of matter"

- Peter Scheponik