Satan Says, and: Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, and: No Ordinary World, and: Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems (review)

139 REVIEWS affecting their relationship: the cost of the room, medical fees, the dependent position of the woman. ... As the speaker pleads for privacy yet another bearded man climbs in, Doktor Freud from Vienna: The newcomer straightens his glasses, peers at Wayman and the girl, "I can see," he begins, that you two have problems____" Wayman manages to laugh at the intrusion of theory into times and places where it isn't welcome, and yet the poem makes it clear enough that ideas do find their way into the bedroom. Poetry has always been welcome there, and in other venues where personal relations flourish, but it has been absent from the factory, the unemployment insurance office—places where important relations occur, not all of them tender. Introducing Tom Wayman shows that poetry can be brought back to the job. Fortunately the poet on the assembly line is not as intrusive as the ideologist in the lovers' bed, not when he has Wayman's sense of humor and empathy for people and physical objects. Bert Almon Sharon Olds, Satan Says. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. 72pp. $9.95 (cloth), $4.50 (paper). David Bottoms, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. New York: WilUam Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980. 59pp. $3.95 (paper). Mekeel McBride, No Ordinary World. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1979. 59pp. $4.50 (paper). Ted Kooser, Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. 93pp. $9.95 (cloth), $4.50 (paper). Lenin says the two basic conceptions of development are development as repetition (metaphysics) and development as a unity of opposites (dialectics). Sharon Olds understand this; however, Satan Says is conceived on a Faustian as weU as a dialectical premise. The result is an unsettling first book whose poems are sensual, muscular, obsessive, charged. The reader is collared with Moonie-Uke aggressiveness and with a libido that can be tiring. The voice in these poems, though often sensational, is believable. It is possessed. Like the daughter in the title poem, Olds is writing her way out of a terrible box to which only Satan holds a key. The speaker in these poems moves or discovers from the very first page. Organized daughter to woman to mother, the book is a rare opportunity in verse to foUow a character's development via conflicts. Nothing is shied away from. I sense a small problem, though, with the sexual braggadocio and Freudian implications which pervade this chronicle. They seem to blanket or mute the honesty, the risk, and the fire of genuine love that is the real power of the poetry. My own first reading of the title poem went astray because of "the magic words, Cock, Cunt. . . ." Entrapped in a tiny cedar box, the persona must make nasty sexual pronouncements against her parents in order for Satan to release her. The demonic command, the sense of enclosure, those magic new words she has learned all crescendo until a reader also can "hardly hear" at the poem's end. This weight crushes the would-be ballast of the final and redemptive image: I am warming my cold hands at the dancer's ruby eye— the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of love. The poem vividly stages the "Daughter" section's main contradiction: chUd vs. parents. Olds's extended metaphors are fresh and clever in their explorations, poems such as "Love Fossil," "Quake Theory," and "Indictment of Senior Officers." These avoid the Plath- 140 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW Sexton syndrome. The integrity, the alternating love-hate work to generate tension like a dynamo. "The Rising Daughter" acts as an icon for the group: a child sucking life from mother, yet assimilating some foreign substance, metaphorical frogmen from the land of the rising sun. they entered me with my mother's milk, a vocation. I would be for myself, then, an enemy to all who do not wish me to rise. In "Woman" the book's first contradiction seems resolved permitting wonderful romping about in Cupid's gym. The body migrations in "First Night" are most striking. A revolution, a new regime in command forces the refugees of childhood to move on. There is freedom now to fuck...