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New Books - 01/04
Free Stream Velocity by John Olson (Black Square Editions $14)
The latest volume from Seattle poet and critic Olson is composed mostly of prose poems. Mr. Olson is a mad-man of language. As Clayton Eshleman says of his work, "Olson's writing is so agitated with transformation that it can barely contain the skin of its own given language." Take, as an example, the beginning of "Morning Arrival": "I feel a devotion to the story, to the divulgence of faucets and neutrons, the train of sunrise and mathematical milk. The trains of ruggedness brooding in the metals of history." Mr. Olson 's work is a marvelous ride, surrealism at break-neck speeds with hairpin turns on you before you can blink.
Search Party: Collected Poems by William Matthews (Houghton Mifflin $26)
Mr. Matthews, who died the day after his fifty-fifth birthday in 1997, had a sweet, humorous, sometimes weary voice. He had published some ten books of poetry, which are collected here along with twenty-seven previously unpublished poems. His poetry features simple, off-kilter music; indeed, he often wrote about jazz and jazz musicians. He had a fine ability for finding the unusual and right metaphor and simile. Take these lines from "Fellow Oddballs" as example: "..Here's to us, / morose at dances and giggly in committee, // and here's to us on whose ironic bodies new clothes / pucker that clung like shrink wrap to the manikins." This collection brings welcome recognition of Mr. Matthews's contribution to American poetry.
Argument & Song: Sources and Silences in Poetry by Stanley Plumly (Handsel
$30)
Ah, Stanley Plumly is a thoughtful man who has been obsessed with poetry for decades. This book is a collection of his essays, with topics ranging from the honesty of birdsong ("Birdsong, in fact, in all its actualizations and silences, forms and suggestions, is like an aural and spiritual backdrop for all poems,...") to the life of the imagination ("The powerful imagination does not work, as every good poem reminds us, unless it comes to an edge, makes its pass, and, one way or another, returns.") He offers deeply contemplated analyses of poetry by examining the work of numerous poets, including many of his generation. Mr. Plumly is serious and well read, and his essays provide a graduate-level course by a poetry-devoted, and therefore fascinating, teacher.
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