Perspectives on Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds - Book Report/Review Example

It has been pointed out that the poem provides a contrast between “emotional coldness and physical heat” (Sutton, 1997, p. 177). The style of the poem is deceptively naturalistic, with no rhymes or stanzas. Some key ideas are presented with alliteration, for example, “wine, wet” (Olds, 1984, line 6) and “the purists, the pros” (Olds, 1984, line 14). Fourfold repetition of the phrase “come to the” in lines 9-10, into which the word “God” is placed, without any proper punctuation, breaks the flow of the otherwise unremarkable syntax as if to suggest that the act of making love is some kind of structural anomaly in another wise regular world.

This is an example of the “proud, urgent, human voice” (Poetry Foundation, p. 1) of the poet at work. Some rather graphic bodily similes such as “faces/red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to/give them away” (Olds, 1984, lines 5-8) break some cultural taboos such as cannibalism and the mothers who neglect their responsibilities. This is an example of what Lewallan calls “her penchant for imaging the bodies of others as meat, red and raw, as well as her penchant for metaphors of predation.

” (Lewallan, 2006, p. 42) There are undertones of violence and neglect in this depiction which contradict prevailing cultural expectations. From all three of these critical perspectives, the sociological, the cultural and the stylistic, Olds presents a re-evaluation of one of the oldest poetic themes in the world: the relationship between love and sex and encourages the reader to view a new, and somewhat shocking paradigm.