Olds' poems delve into depths of love

------------------------- "Blood, Tin, Straw" by Sharon Olds

Knopf, $15 -------------------------

Sharon Olds sticks close to the elements of life, not only in her subject matter but in her use of language as well.

Yet her verse, so close in tone and content to the bare bones of human life, is by no means unadorned. Rather, the flourishes are in the service of her message, not distractions from it.

The result is poetry more faithful to the felt truth of reality than any prose could be.

"Blood, Tin, Straw," is Olds' sixth collection of poems (her second, "The Dead and the Living," received the 1983 National Book Award).

It takes us into the most intimate moments of life: reading the diary her father wrote as a young man, exploring the aisles of a country store while her fiancÀe arranges for the justice of the peace to perform an impromptu wedding ceremony, making love with her boyfriend during the years when Vietnam seemed to make love an unconscionable self-indulgence.

"The Promise," for example, traces the emotional complexity of utterly committed love: "With the second drink, at the restaurant, / holding hands on the bare table, / we are at it again, renewing our promise / to kill each other."

The poem turns marvelously on that undefined "it." "It" is love, fear, devotion - a mix of emotions that can't be named except by the poem itself.

The man and woman are young enough to dread helpless old age more than death, old enough to see it looming in their own future: "What you do not want / is to lie in a hospital bed for a year / after a stroke, without being able to think or die."

The intimate commitment to deliver one another from suffering is paralleled, in the woman's heart, with the intimacy of their sexual union and of the births of their children. They have been, she says, "the halves of a creature / drifting up to the lip of matter / and over it." The poem gives a deeper, unexpected meaning to the phrase "committed for life."

In "At Home," a woman gazes upon her husband's face as he falls asleep. She recognizes that his "drifting off" resembles death, and her gentle waking of him becomes therefore a kind of resurrection, a sign of the power of love: "His eyelid lifts - / justice, mercy. We look at each other / till our eyes are wet, then we rest awhile, / and then we stare at each other, almost / emotionless with sex and trust."

The words rise above sentimentality by acknowledging how complex such moments really are. What does "almost / emotionless" mean? Perhaps that such complete love cannot be located anywhere within as a mere feeling, or perhaps that to give oneself over so completely to another is to pass through and beyond any familiar emotion.

Simply to say that Olds portrays a world suffused with love is to trivialize what these poems indisputably earn.

Recollections of her mother and father, recognitions of her growing children, reconciliation with her own aging body - all of these are paid the highest of honors by unflinching examination.

The love expressed in "Blood, Tin, Straw" is an emotion that never turns aside from reality, never demeans the object of love by misrepresenting it.

Sharon Olds offers the hope that we can love most truly, not despite our human limitation, but through them: "We are entering, / deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze, / this place beyond the other places, / beyond the body itself, we are making / love."