The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds (Knopf, 144pgs.,$15.00)

Mistress of all things physical, Sharon Olds continues her love affair with matter in her newest book, The Unswept Room. In this unabashed collection, Olds explores sexuality with a mixture of license and reverence, proving herself, once again, the premiere bard of the body.

In “Sunday Night,” Olds savors “womanly beauty, and manly beauty,” placing them in the consumable company of “wines, and, meats, and fruits.” Using Edenesque intimations, Olds transports us “back to the beginning,” before the fall, before judgment, allowing us to see “the whole body as blameless and lovely.” Olds coaxes us to contemplate the power of our own sexuality in “The Shyness,” as she explores “the vaulted spaces of the body / like a sacred woods.” Like Ginsberg before her, Olds leaves us “howling in the wilderness” of physical pleasure and psychic pain. Delving into the exquisite sensations of post-coital bliss, “The Untangling” offers beautiful sensuality as “[l]imb / by limb by lip by lip by sex by / sparkle of salt,” we imagine spent lovers as they disengage. Olds reminds us, however, in “A Time of Passion,” that physical sex is a mixture of “anguish and pleasure,” as she warns us against the danger of “playing each other” far from “the realm of love.”

Love of matter is not restricted to sexuality. In her poem “Wilderness,” Olds leads her readers in Camus-like fashion to a desert and a night sky, where she casts us all “up deep into the universe,” hoping to show us the truth about physical creation: that it is “absolute, crisp, impersonal, intimate, benign without sweetness.” For those of us who are astute enough to grasp the benignity and intimacy of the universe, Olds suggests in “Heaven to Be,” that we view the physical cosmos as “another version of having a soul.”

Olds’s poetic commitment remains, as always, an unrestrained canticle of the corporeal. The Unswept Room is a hymnal to the ineffable beauty of matter, its songs sung “in pure attentiveness, cold and adoring” (“S”).

-- reviewed by Peter Scheponik