In "Diving into the Wreck", one of the signature poems of the women's movement, Adrienne Rich saw women writers as burdened with "a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear". For several decades, Sharon Olds has been fascinating readers by weaving the myth of her own female existence into a Nessus shirt of flaming sensuousness. Like Whitman, she is a remarkable mythopoeic poet of bodily identity, and in the latter stages of this striking new collection explores ageing through the cases of both herself and her dying mother, to whom she addresses movingly conciliatory elegies at the last.

But she opens with a dozen meditations on war photographs that have slashed her imagination to the quick. One of her own mythic personae, it appears, is that of war baby, one brought disturbingly alive by the universal struggle for existence. Her sensibility is erotically excited by violence and danger. A brave pilot, having bought his crew time to parachute from his burning bomber, turns its nose to the ground and sees "the earth coming up towards him, / green as a great basin of water / being lifted to his face". Parents stand appalled as a thuggish soldier picks up the "amber / torso-shape" of their child's cello, and breaks it against a fireplace where "the brickwork crushed / the close-grained satiny wood". Olds can read like a thrill junkie at times.

This character trait is traced back to source in the second section, and attributed to the harshly inhibiting punitive background of her Puritan upbringing. But rebellion is not only bred in her changeling's genes - to her mother she seems demonically possessed, even as a baby. Even more importantly for a poet, it is invitingly present in the very language she is given to speak. A remarkable poem has Olds explore, with baroque wantonness, the dictionary meanings of her maiden name of Cobb. It's the heady, verbal equivalent of splitting the atom - identity is multiplied exponentially through a chain reaction. There is deep pain at the root of this verbal saturnalia, however. "Dear Dad," she writes, acknowledging, perhaps, the most problematic of all her relationships, "I search for how / to be your daughter." In that moment, she also reveals herself to be, in part, the poetic daughter of another great risk-taking American, John Berryman, who repeatedly yearned in his extraordinary psycho-drama Dream Songs to lay to rest the ghost of "the dreadful banker ... / who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn".

It is, though, the question of how to be her mother's daughter that most consumes her in this volume. Much of her life, it seems, has been engaged in devising strategies of liberation from that oppressive tie. One of the most remarkable poems in this collection has her metamorphose into a fly on the wall of her Puritan family home: "in each of the hundred / eyes of both of my compound eyes, / one wallpaper rose". It's an astonishing image for the terrible fixity of a pathological obsession. And the opposite of it is the kind of freely licensed and licentious vision Olds tries to develop in herself through her poetry: "a looking / primed ... a looking to the power of itself".

Her great ally in this enterprise of self-liberation is, as always, the body. It has an uncontrollable, animal life of its own, which she relishes with a libertine delight. Another of Olds's mythic personae is Diana the huntress, because she, too, seems most fiercely happy when surrounded by the bestiary of her own being. Witness Olds's memory in one poem of the fantastic creatures that decorated her nightie as a child, a scene reprised in another when her teenage daughter chooses an "Animal Dress" to wear when first leaving home for college:

And then she was on the train, in her dress
like a zodiac, her body covered with
the animals that carried us in their
bodies for a thousand centuries
of sex and death, until flesh knew itself, and spoke.

Those last two phrases could well serve as an epigraph for all of Olds's writing.

The poems about her mother's decline and death in the last sections are all the more powerful because Olds's acute powers of empathy are the mature expression of the fiercely sensuous young imagination that had so frightened and appalled her parents. So, glimpsing her mother paralysed in the light of the ambulance that is carrying her second husband away, she sees her "so vivid, / like a woman motionless at the moment of orgasm, / pure attention . . . / every cell of her body was looking at him". Hearing her loneliness speak down the wires of a phone is, for Olds, to hear in her voice "the low singing / of a watered plant long not watered". The brain tumour that claims her is the final revelation of that feral life of the body that Olds has always so uninhibitedly known. And then, when it's over, the cremation done, her mother no more than "the pint of her hearth-stuff", Olds holds all that is left of her in her hands for the last time:

And my mother
was violet-gray, she was blue spruce,
twilight, fur, I ran my hand into the
evening talcum of her absent action

It is a remarkable conclusion to a memorable collection.

 M Wynn Thomas is the author of Transatlantic Connections: Whitman US, Whitman UK (University of Iowa Press)