The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds

"Sometimes a crumb falls / From the tables of joy, / Sometimes a bone / Is flung. / To some people / Love is given, / To others / Only heaven." When Sharon Olds, being interviewed, quotes Langston Hughes's poem, I wonder how she sees herself among those people. Seeing and knowing, being seen and known, is at the heart of The Unswept Room, her eighth collection. If every lyric is about the Fall, then here, the whole book is: an ultimately tragic story of a woman falling out of "ideal stars, ideal sky" into a room where the guest has gone and she can offer only "fancies of crumbs / from under love's table".

"Sometimes a crumb falls / From the tables of joy, / Sometimes a bone / Is flung. / To some people / Love is given, / To others / Only heaven." When Sharon Olds, being interviewed, quotes Langston Hughes's poem, I wonder how she sees herself among those people. Seeing and knowing, being seen and known, is at the heart of The Unswept Room, her eighth collection. If every lyric is about the Fall, then here, the whole book is: an ultimately tragic story of a woman falling out of "ideal stars, ideal sky" into a room where the guest has gone and she can offer only "fancies of crumbs / from under love's table".

There is no middle ground in Olds's work. Having always swung between agony and ecstasy, here the pendulum is arrested in the ecstatic not, one feels, by an act of grace, but of will. Sharon Olds grew up in what she has called "a hellfire Episcopalian religion" and came to poetry by making a vow to Satan on the steps of Columbia University, after receiving her doctorate, "to write my own stuff".

After much stuff in which she defies or deifies the profane, now redemption - or self-correction - is sought in the sacred. Sexual love is biblical, Song of Solomon-like in its aspirations, female genitals are conflated with "Jesus's bearded face" and her mother's sex is seen as "spear in the side / and crown of thorns mashed together".

Her passion has the intensity of vows taken early, almost monastic in their severity, and she remakes them frequently. One is struck by the power of her resolve, but also by the confines of her cell. Her themes are traditional - childhood, parenting, marital love, rites of passage. But it is not the limited subject-matter that is constricting, so much as the enforcement of a will which deprives her subjects of theirs, and of their natural scale. The father on the couch, the punished daughter strapped to a chair; her iconic cast-iron figures appear like dolls sculpted by a child, overbearingly larger than herself.

A childlike sensibility is her greatest strength. It is almost miraculous at times in its freshness. "What It Meant", one of the loveliest poems, opens with "I didn't know what it meant, that he was born / in the beauty of the lilies" and the innocence of a child lives in the shining adult gaze: "I thought they were / shyly saying Mary's body, / he came from the blossom of a woman, he was born / in the beauty of her lily."

However, a child will often see herself as the centre of the universe and, though Olds says "I long for my I / to die", she can't always achieve the separation she longs for, but forces an emotional impact the poems can't carry. Where she uses comic hyperbole, as in "Virginal Orgy", she is delightful, Chaplinesque, positively beatified by love, daft and giddy with it.

Nearly all the poems start by pinpointing a moment, often with the word "When". Her syntax is incremental and when she does move off its stair and sideways into space, it is to an unearthly space without moorings. Olds is a brave poet, not because she is transgressive, but because she is confessedly naive. When finally, in the dignity and brokenness of the last poems, she enters "the gates of the fallen", the sudden fall into knowledge is vertiginous, and heart-stopping: "It never crossed my mind that he no longer/ loved me, that we had left the realm of love."

Mimi Khalvati's 'Selected Poems' are published by Carcanet