Poetry review – SATAN SAYS: Charles Rammelkamp takes a fresh look at a re-issued classic by Sharon Olds
Satan Says
Sharon Olds
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025
ISBN: 978-0822948971
$25.00, 112 pages
Originally published in 1980, which, as Diane Seuss notes in her Introduction, was the year Ronald Reagan was first elected president and John Lennon was assassinated, Satan Says still brims with rage. Reams of essays, term papers and reviews have been written about Sharon Olds in the decades since Satan Says was selected by Ed Ochester for the Pitt Poetry Series. Writing something fresh about this collection is a serious challenge. What hasn’t been said already? Yes, the title poem and the collection generally explore themes of rebellion and self-discovery through family relationships. This does not necessarily need to be pointed out again. But the main takeaway for me, which justifies the republication, is that the poems still feel fresh and original reading them again all these years later.
“Satan Says,” of course, is a play on the children’s game, Simon Says. (“Simon says, touch your toes,” and all the children in the kindergarten class touch their toes.) Here, that ultimate purveyor of temptation promises the speaker that he can release her from her self-imposed prison (her coffin) if she will only repeat vulgarities after him.
I’ll get you out. Say
My father is a shit. I say
my father is a shit and Satan
laughs and says, It’s opening.
Say your mother is a pimp.
My mother is a pimp. Something
opens and breaks when I say that.
There’s actually something kind of humorous here in Satan’s taunting, the underlying child’s chant twisted to prurient vulgarity. In any case, she balks by the end, resisting the seduction in almost Little Red Riding Hood fashion.
But transgress? You betcha that’s what Olds does! The poem itself is proof.
Say: the father’s cock, the mother’s
cunt, says Satan, I’ll get you out.
But at the poem’s end, Satan condemns her to her coffin when she won’t obey him. And yet, the speaker has had an insight, ‘the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.’ Yes, she recognizes her parents’ shortcomings, the father’s alcoholism, his abuse, the mother’s enabling, but forgiveness is always part of the deal.
But we know all this already after forty-five years of reader analyses and student essays, don’t we? Does it need to be said again? Or can it not be said too often?
Born in 1942, the memory of World War II still very fresh, Olds, in writing her way to her own liberation (for that’s the essence of Satan Says), alludes more than once to the Nazis. In the poem “That Year,” which we learn is the year she began menstruating, she mentions learning about Auschwitz in her Social Studies class, the ‘piles of white bodies’ in the concentration camps. The guards were Protestants, ‘like my father and me,’ but the speaker identifies with the Jews.
I wanted, in my ignorance,
to share some part of the word survivor.
In the “Journey” section of the book (“Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother” and “Journey” make up the four parts of Satan Says), there is a poem called “Time-Travel,” in which she reconsiders her father and the family traumas, whose verse likewise ends on that word, “survivor.”
She does not know she is the one
survivor.
Survival equals moral victory. “Indictment of Senior Officers,” from the “Daughter” section likewise alludes to the war. Remarking on her sister’s ‘marks from the latest husband’s beatings,’ the poem ends, ‘I feel the
rage of a soldier standing over the body of
someone sent to the front lines
without training
or a weapon.
Again, in “Young Mother IV,” from the “Mother” section, Olds refers to the inhumanity of the Nazis. You can feel her rage. The poet is considering a young mother and her toddler in a coffeehouse; they are the object of everybody’s attention.
Suddenly I think she will scream,
this watched woman, this marked woman,
stared at like the women with shaved heads
in Germany in 44. I think she will
turn to us all and shriek, her face
swelling dark as a heart…
Rage is indeed the prominent emotion of Satan Says. The four “Young Mother” poems speak to this restlessness, this exhausting vigilance, a seething need to react. ‘She is all eyes and ears for damage,’ Olds begins “Young Mother II,” the mother always alert to the vulnerability of her offspring. In the final lines of the poem you feel a real resentment for this overwhelming responsibility. As she goes about cooking and caring and cleaning,
she stands outside a window and watches a childless couple
fucking in the resinous light of a fire
without interruption.
Olds recalls those carefree days herself. At the start of “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure,” she confesses, ‘As soon as my sister and I got out of our / mother’s house, all we wanted to / do was fuck….’ But once she becomes a mother herself? Like their own mothers, “They are always fearing,” she writes in “Drowning.” In poems like “First Night” and “I Am the Shrink’s Wife,” Olds considers being a wife (‘angry as high heels, my heart is / clicking sharp as needles’). Whatever the role – daughter, wife, mother – Sharon Olds spells out the disadvantages, the shortcomings, the injustice. But it’s not simple “complaint.” There’s this underlying urge to live.
The final poem, “Prayer,” is about giving birth. So, too, is “The Language of the Brag,” in which she writes:
I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body.
Like Whitman – whom she also addresses in the poem, “Nurse Whitman” – in “Prayer” Olds sings the body electric, the female body that she inhabits, in all its blood and pain:
the terrible fear
as the child’s head moves down into the vagina:
there is no stopping it, the huge dark
body moving down out of me
like the whole inside of my own body
being pushed out…
Celebrating this ultimate act of creation, Sharon Olds concludes “Prayer” – concludes Satan Says:
let me not forget
each action, each word
taking its beginning from these.
For this alone the republication of Satan Says is cause for celebration and reflection.
Nov 6 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Sharon Olds
Poetry review – SATAN SAYS: Charles Rammelkamp takes a fresh look at a re-issued classic by Sharon Olds
Originally published in 1980, which, as Diane Seuss notes in her Introduction, was the year Ronald Reagan was first elected president and John Lennon was assassinated, Satan Says still brims with rage. Reams of essays, term papers and reviews have been written about Sharon Olds in the decades since Satan Says was selected by Ed Ochester for the Pitt Poetry Series. Writing something fresh about this collection is a serious challenge. What hasn’t been said already? Yes, the title poem and the collection generally explore themes of rebellion and self-discovery through family relationships. This does not necessarily need to be pointed out again. But the main takeaway for me, which justifies the republication, is that the poems still feel fresh and original reading them again all these years later.
“Satan Says,” of course, is a play on the children’s game, Simon Says. (“Simon says, touch your toes,” and all the children in the kindergarten class touch their toes.) Here, that ultimate purveyor of temptation promises the speaker that he can release her from her self-imposed prison (her coffin) if she will only repeat vulgarities after him.
There’s actually something kind of humorous here in Satan’s taunting, the underlying child’s chant twisted to prurient vulgarity. In any case, she balks by the end, resisting the seduction in almost Little Red Riding Hood fashion.
But transgress? You betcha that’s what Olds does! The poem itself is proof.
But at the poem’s end, Satan condemns her to her coffin when she won’t obey him. And yet, the speaker has had an insight, ‘the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.’ Yes, she recognizes her parents’ shortcomings, the father’s alcoholism, his abuse, the mother’s enabling, but forgiveness is always part of the deal.
But we know all this already after forty-five years of reader analyses and student essays, don’t we? Does it need to be said again? Or can it not be said too often?
Born in 1942, the memory of World War II still very fresh, Olds, in writing her way to her own liberation (for that’s the essence of Satan Says), alludes more than once to the Nazis. In the poem “That Year,” which we learn is the year she began menstruating, she mentions learning about Auschwitz in her Social Studies class, the ‘piles of white bodies’ in the concentration camps. The guards were Protestants, ‘like my father and me,’ but the speaker identifies with the Jews.
In the “Journey” section of the book (“Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother” and “Journey” make up the four parts of Satan Says), there is a poem called “Time-Travel,” in which she reconsiders her father and the family traumas, whose verse likewise ends on that word, “survivor.”
Survival equals moral victory. “Indictment of Senior Officers,” from the “Daughter” section likewise alludes to the war. Remarking on her sister’s ‘marks from the latest husband’s beatings,’ the poem ends, ‘I feel the
Again, in “Young Mother IV,” from the “Mother” section, Olds refers to the inhumanity of the Nazis. You can feel her rage. The poet is considering a young mother and her toddler in a coffeehouse; they are the object of everybody’s attention.
Rage is indeed the prominent emotion of Satan Says. The four “Young Mother” poems speak to this restlessness, this exhausting vigilance, a seething need to react. ‘She is all eyes and ears for damage,’ Olds begins “Young Mother II,” the mother always alert to the vulnerability of her offspring. In the final lines of the poem you feel a real resentment for this overwhelming responsibility. As she goes about cooking and caring and cleaning,
Olds recalls those carefree days herself. At the start of “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure,” she confesses, ‘As soon as my sister and I got out of our / mother’s house, all we wanted to / do was fuck….’ But once she becomes a mother herself? Like their own mothers, “They are always fearing,” she writes in “Drowning.” In poems like “First Night” and “I Am the Shrink’s Wife,” Olds considers being a wife (‘angry as high heels, my heart is / clicking sharp as needles’). Whatever the role – daughter, wife, mother – Sharon Olds spells out the disadvantages, the shortcomings, the injustice. But it’s not simple “complaint.” There’s this underlying urge to live.
The final poem, “Prayer,” is about giving birth. So, too, is “The Language of the Brag,” in which she writes:
Like Whitman – whom she also addresses in the poem, “Nurse Whitman” – in “Prayer” Olds sings the body electric, the female body that she inhabits, in all its blood and pain:
Celebrating this ultimate act of creation, Sharon Olds concludes “Prayer” – concludes Satan Says:
For this alone the republication of Satan Says is cause for celebration and reflection.